Trump Elected, Aleppo Falls, Hurricane Matthew Devastates Haiti and the Berlin Christmas Market Is Attacked

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 January 2017 | Reporting Period: 3 October – 2 January 2017

Quarterly Briefing

• Donald Trump wins the United States presidential election on November 8 in a result that surprises most of the world; Hillary Clinton wins the popular vote but Trump takes the Electoral College with victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
• Syrian government forces, backed by Russia and Iran, complete the siege and bombardment of eastern Aleppo in December; the city’s defenders surrender and tens of thousands of civilians are evacuated under Russian and Turkish guarantees.
• Hurricane Matthew strikes Haiti on October 4 as a Category 4 storm, killing over 500 people and devastating southern Haiti; it then tracks through the Bahamas, Cuba and the US southeast coast.
• A Tunisian attacker drives a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin on December 19, killing 12; hours earlier, Russia’s ambassador to Turkey was shot dead at an Ankara art exhibition.
• Colombia’s peace agreement with the FARC is rejected in an October 2 referendum; a revised deal is subsequently ratified by Congress in November, ending a 52-year conflict.
• The Obama administration expels 35 Russian diplomats and imposes sanctions on December 29 in response to Russian interference in the US presidential election, confirmed by the intelligence community.

Prologue: The Quarter the World Changed

If a single quarter can be said to have altered the trajectory of international politics for a generation, the final quarter of 2016 has a strong claim. The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States on 8 November introduced into the world’s most powerful executive office a politician who had explicitly questioned the value of NATO, praised Vladimir Putin, threatened to withdraw from international trade agreements and promised a fundamental reorientation of American foreign policy away from the multilateral framework that had governed Western relations since 1945. For the Caribbean — a region wholly dependent on the United States for tourism, remittances, security cooperation and economic partnership — a Trump presidency presented questions that would take months and years to answer. Meanwhile, Syria’s largest city was reduced to rubble, Haiti suffered another major hurricane, and terrorists killed civilians in a German Christmas market.

Trump’s Election and the Caribbean’s Uncertainty

The result of November 8 surprised markets, analysts and most professional political observers. Trump had won the Republican nomination against a large field and had run a campaign centred on immigration restriction, trade protectionism and an explicit scepticism of the international institutions and alliances that had defined American foreign policy since the Second World War. Clinton had been widely expected to win. The Electoral College’s geographic arithmetic produced a Trump victory despite a popular vote deficit of nearly three million. Markets initially fell sharply on election night before recovering; the US dollar strengthened, reflecting expectations of fiscal expansion.

For Jamaica and the Caribbean, the Trump election raised several immediate concerns. The new administration’s immigration agenda — including potential changes to Temporary Protected Status programmes and more aggressive deportation enforcement — directly threatened the livelihoods and legal status of hundreds of thousands of Caribbean diaspora members in the United States. Remittances, which are among the most important sources of foreign exchange for many Caribbean nations, flow from that diaspora. Any reduction in the capacity or willingness of Caribbean Americans to send money home would have immediate household-level consequences. Trade policy uncertainty added a further layer of risk for Caribbean economies with US market exposure.

Hurricane Matthew and Haiti

Hurricane Matthew struck the Tiburon Peninsula of southern Haiti on 4 October as a Category 4 storm, the most powerful hurricane to make landfall in Haiti since records began. The towns of Jérémie and Les Cayes suffered extensive destruction. The official death toll exceeded 500, though some estimates placed it considerably higher; crops, livestock and livelihoods were destroyed across an area of southern Haiti that had only recently been recovering from the 2010 earthquake. Matthew subsequently struck the Bahamas and the eastern coastlines of Cuba before approaching the Florida and South Carolina coasts, causing significant flooding and property damage without the death toll that had accumulated in Haiti.

Haiti’s inability to absorb the Matthew disaster without catastrophic loss of life was a direct consequence of its persistent governance failure, extreme poverty and infrastructure deficit. CARICOM and international donors responded with emergency assistance. Jamaica participated in relief efforts. But the recurring cycle — Haiti hit by disaster, international community responds, situation stabilises at a level below pre-disaster inadequacy, capacity to respond to the next disaster diminishes — had been repeating for decades without the structural intervention that genuine transformation would require.

Aleppo: The Fall of a City

The Syrian government’s siege of eastern Aleppo, home to approximately 250,000 civilians and under rebel control since 2012, culminated in December 2016 with the complete recapture of the city. The final weeks saw intense bombardment of civilian areas that the UN described as potentially constituting war crimes. A ceasefire and evacuation agreement brokered by Russia and Turkey allowed the remaining rebels and civilians to be transported to opposition-held territory in the north. The fall of Aleppo represented the most significant territorial shift in the Syrian civil war and effectively ensured the Assad government’s survival; the opposition’s ability to challenge Damascus militarily was permanently diminished. Russia’s role was central and demonstrated the decisive effect of airpower in the conflict.

Berlin, Ankara and Colombia

On 19 December, a Tunisian national who had been living in Germany on a rejected asylum claim drove a stolen lorry into a crowded Christmas market in central Berlin, killing 12 and injuring 56. Hours earlier and thousands of miles away, Russia’s ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, was shot dead in Ankara by a Turkish police officer shouting slogans about Syria. The two events occurring on the same day crystallised the intersecting crises of Syria, migration, terrorism and Russia’s role in the Middle East that had defined European politics through 2016.

In a brighter development, Colombia’s government and the FARC guerrillas reached a revised peace agreement following the original deal’s narrow rejection in the October 2 referendum. The revised agreement was ratified by Congress in November, ending 52 years of armed conflict that had killed over 220,000 people. For the wider Latin American and Caribbean region, the Colombian peace agreement offered a model of negotiated resolution to long-running armed conflicts and a prospect for recovery in a neighbouring economy whose stability had been constrained by decades of violence.

Looking Ahead

Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20 January will mark the formal transition to an administration whose policies on immigration, trade, NATO and Russia remain incompletely defined but directionally alarming for the international system that Caribbean small states depend upon. Syria’s war is not over — large territories remain outside government control, the humanitarian crisis is immense and no political settlement is in sight — but Assad’s survival is now essentially assured. Haiti’s recovery from Matthew requires sustained international attention. And Venezuela’s political and economic implosion continues to accelerate, threatening the PETROCARIBE arrangement and regional stability. Jamaica enters 2017 with its fiscal programme on track and its tourism sector performing strongly — but the world it faces is materially more uncertain than the one it faced twelve months ago.

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Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

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