Watching the latest headlines from the Caribbean, one feels a creeping sensation of déjà vu. Not the pleasant kind that reminds you of a half-forgotten tune. The kind that crawls up your spine when history repeats itself as farce. Haitian officials kidnapped. A security corridor patrolled by His Majesty’s Navy. The Empire Strikes Back, but with a distinctly post-modern, bureaucratic twist.
Let us dispense with the niceties. The kidnapping of Haitian officials is not an isolated incident of banditry. It is a symptom, a pustule on the diseased body politic of a failed state. Haiti has been a laboratory for foreign intervention and local misrule for two centuries. The current chaos is merely the latest iteration of a grim cycle. The question is not why this happened. The question is why anyone thought it would not.
And now the Royal Navy sails into the fray. A carrier strike group or a couple of patrol boats, it matters not. The symbolism is potent. We are being asked to believe that a naval deployment can secure a “security corridor” in a region where the very concept of a state has evaporated. This is the logic of the Athenian expedition to Sicily, the British adventure in the Dardanelles. It is the hubris of believing that a show of force can substitute for a coherent strategy.
The Victorians at least understood that empire required administration, commerce, and cultural hegemony, not just gunboats. They built railways and schools and legal codes, however flawed. What do we offer today? A corridor. A zone. A technical fix for a political and moral collapse.
But let us examine the deeper rot. The Caribbean was once the cockpit of empire, a place where sugar and slaves built fortunes and fuelled revolutions. Now it is a transit point for drugs and migrants, a playground for oligarchs, a source of alarm for chanceries. We have forgotten that geography is destiny. The islands are not a periphery. They are a crossroads. And crossroads attract trouble.
The kidnapping itself is a masterpiece of symbolic violence. It targets the very people who are supposed to represent order. It demonstrates that no one is safe, not even those who claim authority. This is the ultimate delegitimisation of the state. And what can a naval deployment do about that? It can patrol waters. It cannot inhabit minds.
The intellectual decadence of our age is to believe that problems have technical solutions. We speak of resilience, capacity building, stakeholder engagement. The language of management consultants applied to the chaos of human affairs. We have forgotten the lessons of Thucydides: that war is a teacher of violence, that fear and honour and interest drive men to folly.
What would a Victorian statesman do? He would send a consul with a firm hand and a sense of mission, backed by marines and a clear policy. He would not conflate a security corridor with a solution. He would ask what kind of Haiti we want, and he would have an answer. We have no answer. We have only a corridor.
The deployment of naval assets is a palliative, a gesture to reassure the anxious voters back home that something is being done. But it is the something of Nero’s fiddle, of Canute’s chair on the shore. It does not address the underlying reality: that a state has collapsed, that a society has unravelled, and that the West has neither the will nor the wisdom to rebuild it.
We are living through the long twilight of the liberal order. The markers are everywhere. In the vacuous speeches of our leaders. In the jargon of our policy papers. In the sight of a Royal Navy frigate sailing to a crisis it cannot solve. The Roman Empire fell because its elites lost faith in their own mission. They became administrators of decline. We have become connoisseurs of our own decay.
The kidnapping in Haiti is a small event, easily forgotten when the next crisis erupts. But it is a portent. It tells us that the world is not becoming safer or more orderly. It is reverting to a mean of chaos, and our leaders have nothing to offer but corridors. The fools have taken the helm. We are all passengers on a ship that may not reach port.
