No, anti-virus software isn’t dead (yet)

island. For now, Puerto Ricans have avoided the kind of radical left-wing politics that motivated Venezuela in the 2000s or Grenada in the 1980s or Cuba in the 1960s. But in a world where high-income countries like France, the United States and the United Kingdom prove subject to protectionism and xenophobia on the right and dabble with full-scale socialism on the left, another decade of crisis and stagnation could spawn the kind of fierce nationalism that exploded in the 1940s and 1950s. At its most extreme, Puerto Rican nationalism resulted in assassination attempt against U.S. President Harry Truman. No one expects Puerto Ricanradicalism to emerge tomorrow, or next year, or even in the next decade, but neither can Puerto Ricans be expected to endure decades of economic decline.

Though Venezuela was always more of a gadfly than a genuine threat to American security, the late Hugo Chávez showed, through his , just how easily it might be to co-opt the region economically. Imagine a world where a Trump administration starts a trade war with China or otherwise antagonizes Xi Jinping, upsetting what has so far been a peaceful, decades-long détente between the United States and China. It could happen. As the United States augments its presence in the East Asia/Pacific region and, in particular, develops closer security ties with and, quite possibly , China might respond by trying to gain a foothold in the Caribbean. Cheap Chinese credit has bought the loyalty of more powerful and wealthier nations than, say, St. Kitts and Nevis, or Antigua and Barbuda, both of which have defaulted during the 2010s. Moreover, unlike the buffoonish ‘Bolivarian’ socialism of the chavista regime, Chinese influence across the Caribbean would be expected to be far more subtle.

Nothing today indicates that the U.S. national interest vis-à-vis the Caribbean is in imminent danger of collapse. Moreover, US rapprochement with Cuba is an opportunity to show that the United States has moved on from the kind of gunboat diplomacy that characterized its neocolonial approach not only to Cuba, but much of the Caribbean, in the 20th century. Just as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry quietly the Monroe Doctrine in 2013, Obama’s trip to Havana is a good-faith demonstration that U.S. policy in the region will start from the basis of mutual sovereignty and respect. But as the scars of the Cold War recede, and U.S. national interests transform to meet new challenges in the middle of the 21st century, strong bilateral relations with Cuba are a first step, not an endpoint, for American policy in the Caribbean.