Minister of Foreign Affairs, during the 2026 Diplomatic Retreat held on Friday 6th November, 2026.
by Hon. E.P. Chet Greene
November 8 2026 | Editorial
A special good morning and welcome to our guest speaker, my colleague FM of St. Lucia, Hon. Alva Batiste.
We meet at a moment when the architecture of the post-war international order is being stress-tested from every direction. For a small island developing state like ours, this is not an abstract debate. It is a daily operational reality. My charge to you today is simple: we must anchor our sovereignty in resilience and we must wield our diplomacy as an instrument of justice.
I want us to be clear-eyed about the environment in which you operate. The global landscape is marked by intensifying geopolitical competition, supply chain fragility and a climate crisis that threatens our very existence. We see powerful states leveraging economic coercion and unilateral measures that undermine the rule of law. We watch as the multilateral system, designed to protect the weak, struggles to restrain the strong. As I have said before, Antigua and Barbuda must navigate this environment with care, intelligence and a steady hand.
The challenges are compounded by an international financial architecture that penalizes us for our vulnerability. We are told we are “too rich” for concessional financing, yet we know that a single climate activity can erase decades of development in hours. This is the injustice of a system that measures income without measuring resilience.
Despite these headwinds, we have not been passive. Your work has ensured that Antigua and Barbuda continues to punch far above our weight.
We hosted the Fourth International Conference on Small Island Developing States in 2024, where we championed the Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS—a blueprint for our survival of small states. We have strengthened our bilateral footprint, opening our Embassy in Beijing to deepen South-South cooperation. We have engaged aggressively on the blue economy, forging partnerships from India to Norway to ensure our ocean resources benefit our people. Unrelenting, we have defended our sovereignty within CARICOM, insisting that regional solidarity is not a one-way street and that the sacrifices made by smaller states in the name of integration must be respected.
Whether you are posted overseas, hold the roll of plenipotentiary, or you are locally based, I charge you with the following:
First, defend our sovereignty. Do not allow our small size to be mistaken for silence or insignificance. Whether in Washington, London, Beijing, New York, Madrid or Havana, you must assert our right to determine our own development path, free from coercion.
Second, pursue justice. Our foreign policy is rooted in the belief that peace is not merely the absence of war, but the presence of fairness. Continue to press for climate finance that is accessible, not merely announced. Continue to demand that the rules of trade work for small states as well as the large ones.
Third, remain resilient. Build alliances that outlast changes in administration. Deepen our ties within CARICOM, the OECS and the wider Commonwealth, but always with the interests of the Antiguan and Barbudan people as your compass.
Colleagues,
My dear colleagues, achievements are not a resting place. Coming out of our hosting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, let us agree to use that platform and the global attention gained, not merely for pageantry but to force a conversation on reparatory justice, climate justice and the adoption of the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index (MVI) as a fair and just matrix to account for our vulnerabilities.
To the diplomats in the room this morning, I say: your posting is not a sinecure. It is a mandate.
The world will not grant us relevance out of sympathy. It will grant us relevance because we are indispensable and principled voices for justice, because we are reliable partners and because we are unafraid to speak truth to power.
You are the frontline of that effort. I ask you to recommit yourselves, not to a government, not to a party but to the service of the people of Antigua and Barbuda. I implore you to represent them with the dignity, integrity, ferocity and the excellence they deserve.
Thank you.
