As ir­re­sistible as the temp­ta­tion to sub­ject the Prime Min­is­ter's full-page ad on Sun­day to Com­mon En­trance stan­dards (as it has), there is some­thing in the mes­sage to which much more at­ten­tion needs to be paid.

It is that in this coun­try’s deal­ings with the rest of the world, in the post-in­de­pen­dence era, we have nev­er tend­ed to be short on self-es­teem and con­fi­dence.

I re­mem­ber for­mer for­eign min­is­ter Ralph Maraj at one Cari­com meet­ing some years ago de­clar­ing that achieve­ment of strong re­gion­al uni­ty had the po­ten­tial to po­si­tion the Caribbean “at the cen­tre of the uni­verse”.

Ja­maicans in the au­di­ence must have opined that the de­c­la­ra­tion of “we lick­le but we tallawah” had ap­par­ent­ly been sub­ject­ed to a mas­sive dose of steroids on that par­tic­u­lar oc­ca­sion.

But it has not all been a eu­phor­ic delu­sion. Sun­day’s full-page state­ment sent me back to Paul K Sut­ton’s com­pi­la­tion of speech­es by the late prime min­is­ter Dr Er­ic Williams. There I found far more elo­quent ex­pres­sion of the ap­pli­ca­tion of po­lit­i­cal “self-de­ter­mi­na­tion” as a ba­sis for en­light­ened, strate­gic in­ser­tion in­to the man­age­ment of in­ter­na­tion­al af­fairs.

Dr Williams, you see, was able to nu­ance mul­ti­ple tiers of en­gage­ment at the re­gion­al, hemi­spher­ic and glob­al lev­els. He did so by sug­gest­ing that it is quite pos­si­ble to find our way in the world (how­ev­er clum­si­ly at times) as a small, sov­er­eign is­land state with a mind of our own.

There were his ob­ser­va­tions about the emer­gence of the Non-Aligned Move­ment in the ear­ly 60s. He not­ed that T&T had been “more non-aligned that most of its col­leagues (and ex­er­cis­ing) the great­est cir­cum­spec­tion in avoid­ing in­ter­fer­ence in the af­fairs or oth­ers”.

Dr Williams was al­so clear that, on the ques­tion of self-con­fi­dence, de­vel­op­ing na­tions had to shape their des­tinies based “in the­o­ry and in prac­tice, on an ac­tive role for the pas­sive par­tic­i­pants of pre­vi­ous cen­turies.”

Of course, the re­al ex­perts can add oth­er lev­els of in­ter­pre­ta­tion and analy­sis but, to me, there is a clear con­nec­tion be­tween the late prime min­is­ter’s as­ser­tions and Sun­day’s clum­si­ly-con­struct­ed yet im­por­tant trea­tise.

There are, of course, those who con­clude that be­ing “force-ripe” on for­eign pol­i­cy has no place in the mod­ern con­text and that there are mat­ters over which our in­puts have ab­solute­ly no force or mean­ing. The same peo­ple al­so typ­i­cal­ly sug­gest that the in­de­pen­dence project, when it comes to for­eign pol­i­cy, has been a mean­ing­less farce.

This, I be­lieve, was the ques­tion be­ing ad­dressed by Sun­day’s text which en­cap­su­lat­ed last week’s “taller and proud­er” pro­nounce­ments by the prime min­is­ter.

But the PM’s ad ap­peared, iron­i­cal­ly, a day af­ter Venezue­lan op­po­si­tion politi­cian, Juan Guaidó scooped the Caribbean me­dia and some re­gion­al diplo­mats via Twit­ter. He did so by an­nounc­ing the out­come of an on­line meet­ing with se­lect­ed Cari­com min­is­ters of for­eign af­fairs, in­clud­ing our own.

The meet­ing, he said, was meant to dis­cuss the “cri­sis” in his coun­try and his vi­sion for the way for­ward. Be­fore then, the meet­ing had in­ex­plic­a­bly re­mained unan­nounced. It ap­peared, based on his re­luc­tant com­ment to the press, that for­eign min­is­ter Den­nis Moses had been re­ly­ing sole­ly on a bland Cari­com press re­lease to re­port pre­lim­i­nar­i­ly on the out­come.

Un­der no cir­cum­stances is this ac­cept­able. The T&T pop­u­la­tion and me­dia are not a set of “storm­ers” to this process.

Mean­while, Dr Williams was not known to be par­tic­u­lar­ly fond of suc­ces­sive Venezue­lan ad­min­is­tra­tions. Sut­ton’s com­pi­la­tion es­tab­lish­es that. One (now de­ceased) for­mer se­nior diplo­mat once told me Williams’ feel­ings ex­ceed­ed a mere ab­sence of fond­ness.

The Twit­ter re­spons­es to Guaidó’s Sun­day scoop in­clud­ed words such as “san­gui­jue­las” (leech­es) and “chu­los” (pimps) when de­scrib­ing Cari­com’s role in the cur­rent im­broglio. His han­dlers had bet­ter watch it.

At a PNM par­ty con­ven­tion in 1975, Dr Williams ex­pand­ed on what he termed “Venezue­lan pen­e­tra­tion of the Caribbean” with ref­er­ence to de­bates at the time over that coun­try’s ex­clu­sive eco­nom­ic zone and its ter­ri­to­r­i­al claim over Guyana’s Es­se­qui­bo re­gion, among oth­ers.

The po­lit­i­cal com­plex­ion at the Pala­cio de Mi­raflo­res had not mat­tered then when it came to these things. This has not changed. The prime min­is­ter’s pre­scribed prag­ma­tism seems per­fect­ly in or­der. But his for­eign min­is­ter needs to lis­ten more close­ly to the in­tend­ed mes­sage.