An­tho­ny Wil­son

Next week's vis­it by Japan­ese Prime Min­is­ter Shin­zo Abe to Port-of-Spain–on the sec­ond leg of a five­na­tion tour of Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean–cer­tain­ly ce­ments T&T's place as the diplo­mat­ic cap­i­tal of the re­gion.

The Japan­ese Prime Min­is­ter, who is vis­it­ing Mex­i­co, Colom­bia, Chile and Brazil, along with T&T, from Ju­ly 25 to Au­gust 2, is mak­ing an his­toric first trip by a Japan­ese leader to T&T.

Prime Min­is­ter Abe's vis­it to T&T will ob­vi­ous­ly be seen in the con­text of the vis­its here last year by Chi­nese Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping and US Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden. But the re­al back­ground to T&T's lead­er­ship role–as the medi­um through which the world speaks to the 15 mem­bers of Cari­com–is the host­ing here in 2009 of the Sum­mit of the Amer­i­c­as and the Com­mon­wealth Heads of Gov­ern­ment Meet­ing.

An­oth­er sig­nal of T&T's lead­er­ship role was the fact that sev­er­al Caribbean lead­ers ac­cept­ed the T&T Prime Min­is­ter's in­vi­ta­tion to ac­com­pa­ny her on the CAL air­craft to the fu­ner­al last year of South Africa's Nel­son Man­dela. The fact that world lead­ers come to Portof- Spain when they want to talk to the Caribbean should not be used by Trinida­di­ans as a source of cheap, chest-beat­ing, one­up­man­ship over our re­gion­al broth­ers and sis­ters.

In­stead, in her talks with Prime Min­is­ter Abe, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar ought to em­brace the role as the re­gion's go­to leader by lever­ag­ing the re­newed re­la­tion­ship with Japan to as­sist in the im­prove­ment of the economies of our Caribbean neigh­bours first.