The Four-Lap Principle: Choosing Between Worse and Worst

Choosing Between Worse and Worst

By Professor C. Justin Robinson
Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal, The UWI Five Islands Campus

This week, as CARICOM Heads of Government gather in Basseterre for their 50th Regular Meeting, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expected at the table. Let us be clear about what that table looks like.

On one side, fifteen Caribbean states whose combined GDP would not rank them among America’s twenty largest cities. On the other, the representative of a nation with four percent of the world’s population that commands twenty-six percent of global GDP, spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on its military, more than the next nine countries combined, controls the world’s reserve currency, and dominates the technological infrastructure through which humanity increasingly communicates, trades, learns, and thinks. No empire in history has simultaneously dominated the economic, military, technological, financial, and institutional dimensions of global power to this degree. That is not rhetoric it is arithmetic.

The conventional narrative says American power has declined since 1945. It has not declined, it has normalized. The US share of global GDP has held at around a quarter for forty years. America’s R&D spending approaches a trillion dollars. The dollar underpins international trade, SWIFT, the IMF, and the World Bank. This is dominance so total it has become invisible to those who exercise it. The claim that it faces existential threat does not survive contact with the data.

China’s economic transformation is the most extraordinary development story in modern history, with close to 800 million people lifted from extreme poverty as GDP per capita rose from $195 to over $13,000. Whatever one thinks of Beijing’s own ambitions, this is a civilizational achievement that should command respect, not alarm. And here is the critical point, China’s rise has not come at the expense of American dominance. American GDP per capita remains nearly seven times China’s. The US spends more than three times what China spends on defence. In frontier technologies, AI, semiconductors, quantum computing, American supremacy remains formidable. China has moved from four laps behind to two laps behind. The gap remains vast.

And yet Washington’s posture suggests that even this narrowing is intolerable. This is what I call the Four-Lap Principle: the demand by a dominant power not merely for superiority, but for a margin of superiority so wide that no competitor can close within strategic proximity across economic, military, technological, or institutional dimensions. Not parity, not convergence but structural unapproachability. The principle is not simply about China. China is merely the case that makes it visible. It has been operating in this hemisphere since the Monroe Doctrine, the insistence that American security requires not just advantage but uncatchable supremacy, and that the aspirations of every other nation must be trimmed to fit within that frame.

For CARICOM states, small, open, vulnerable economies that together account for a fraction of one percent of global GDP, the Four-Lap Principle is the architecture of daily life. It is the farmer whose export market vanished overnight because of a “reciprocal” tariff designed to punish some other nation. It is the small island watching promised climate finance evaporate. When Washington imposes tariffs, our producers are collateral damage. When deportees arrive by the planeload, our societies absorb the cost.

This is not new as Caribbean nations have operated under the shadow of American power since the Monroe Doctrine, through structural adjustment, through the de-risking that nearly destroyed our banking systems. Our ancestors navigated the Middle Passage. Our forebears built nations from plantation economies. They knew something about surviving overwhelming power, not by confronting it directly, but by preserving a space of dignity and self-determination within its grip. That historical inheritance, the statesmanship of the small, is our greatest resource.

And so the choices for our tiny nation states appear to collapse into two. Worse: fall in line, accept the Four-Lap Principle and trim your aspirations to fit. Cap your ambitions at what Washington will tolerate. This path offers survival at a permanent discount, growth constrained, sovereignty conditional, potential perpetually deferred. It is the quiet tragedy of nations that internalize the frame and build economies their nationals endure rather than choose. Worst: refuse the frame entirely. Cuba tested the Four-Lap Principle and has been strangled for it ever since. Grenada in 1983, Venezuela under sanctions each represents the cost of stepping outside Washington’s permitted orbit.

Neither option is freedom but neither is the binary as fixed as it appears. Small states have always found ways to exercise agency within asymmetric relationships, making themselves indispensable, stretching the frame without breaking it. The question for CARICOM is not whether we accept this reality but how skilfully we navigate it, and whether fifteen sovereign governments with very different risk exposures can forge enough unity to negotiate as one.

But the Four-Lap Principle is not only our problem. It is America’s.

To be fair, Washington’s concerns are not invented. Great powers worry about technological diffusion, supply chain vulnerabilities, intellectual property theft, coercive diplomacy, and the weaponization of economic interdependence. The security dilemma is real, defensive measures by one actor are perceived as offensive by another. But when convergence itself is treated as provocation, strategic prudence hardens into structural insecurity.

But consider what the Four-Lap Principle asks of the world, that one nation, with four percent of humanity, maintain a margin of dominance so vast that the remaining ninety-six percent can never close within reach. That is not security, it is a demand that the rest of the world accept permanent subordination as the price of one nation’s comfort.

The choice facing Washington is not whether it will remain first, it most certainly will. The choice is what kind of first it intends to be. Leadership secured by confidence expands the track while leadership governed by anxiety narrows it. A superpower that knows its strength does not need a permanent four-lap distance to prove it. But when advancements in any other nation is treated as provocation, the pressure radiates outward, not to the rival in the next lane, but to the smallest runners at the edge, where the track is already thin.

The Caribbean does not seek parity. It does not seek to outrun the United States. It seeks room, room to build resilient economies, to diversify partnerships, to dignify its development without that aspiration being misread as defiance. Our relationship with the United States is deep and indispensable, bound by geography, culture, commerce, and shared security. This is not an argument for rupture. Nor is China a substitute hegemon waiting benevolently in another lane. Dependency does not disappear when its accent changes.

If hemispheric stability is the shared objective, three practical adjustments follow:

1. Climate finance must move from pledges to binding disbursement schedules, with streamlined access for vulnerable economies.

2. Trade and sanctions regimes designed for strategic rivalry should incorporate formal carve-outs for small, climate-vulnerable states, insulating them from collateral damage.

3. Migration and security compacts must explicitly recognize reintegration costs and shared fiscal responsibility, rather than transferring burden downstream.

These are not radical demands. They are stability-enhancing mechanisms.

If American leadership is as durable as its record suggests, it can afford to lead without fear of being approached. It can afford to see convergence not as encroachment, but as evidence that the system it shaped is working.

That is the hard conversation our leaders must have, not just with Mr. Rubio, but among themselves, and clearly to Washington: we are prepared to be full partners in hemispheric stability, but we are not prepared to be collateral damage in a race we never entered. Let us hope they find, as Caribbean people always have, the narrow path and that this time, they pave it with a unified voice. True leadership by a dominant nation is not measured by how far ahead it runs, but by how securely others are allowed to run alongside it without being pushed toward the margins. True leadership will not ask free people to choose between worse and worst.

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