Dear all,

We welcome you to the Greater Caribbean Monitor (GCaM).

And it's a completely redesigned GCaM. Since we launched this newsletter, a great deal has changed. Our latest changes, however, are intended to reflect the exclusivity of the content you receive. We believe our visual identity should match the quality of our work.

Today’s edition is a special one. The Greater Caribbean is a fascinating region, shaped by a shared Hispanic heritage and a rich blend of cultures that extends into the southern United States. As we approach the day commemorating the discovery of the Americas, we hope to connect with our U.S. audience and share what being Hispanic means to us. It goes far beyond Christopher Columbus and has remarkably little to do with race. It is something much greater: a civilizational inheritance born from an encounter that transformed a continent marked by warfare and human sacrifice into an integral part of Western civilization.

We genuinely believe that this region is, in many ways, the last frontier of a Western civilization struggling to survive in Europe. The United States and Hispanic America are, today, among the last great heirs of Rome. Yet, as Hispanics, we seem to have forgotten much of that inheritance. Our mission is to remind everyone of it.

So, as you explore GCaM’s new visual experience, we invite you to take a few minutes to reflect on what we believe deserves to be remembered as one of the most consequential events in the history of civilization: the discovery of the Americas, the encounter between two worlds, and the birth of Hispanidad.

As always, please feel free to share GCaM with your friends and colleagues. We all, at the GCaM team, wish you a good weekend, and we thank you for your support.

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus reached the shores of the Americas, setting in motion what would become, after the birth, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, arguably the most consequential development in human history. The encounter between Spain and the New World transformed two continents and gave birth to a civilization that today encompasses hundreds of millions of people united by language, culture, institutions, and, above all, faith.

Across the Hispanic world, October 12 is traditionally celebrated as Día de la Hispanidad. Yet what should be an occasion for civilizational gratitude has increasingly become an invitation to historical repentance. Five centuries after Columbus, Spain is regularly portrayed as the architect of an enterprise defined principally by exploitation and destruction, while the extraordinary civilization that emerged from its encounter with the Americas receives considerably less attention. History, fortunately, offers a far more remarkable account.

The Americas before Columbus were home to civilizations of extraordinary sophistication, considering their isolation. The Maya developed advanced mathematical and astronomical knowledge, while the Aztecs constructed an imperial capital whose architecture and urban organization astonished European observers. Yet these achievements coexisted with practices that hardly resemble the peaceful societies sometimes imagined in contemporary accounts of pre-Columbian history.

The Aztec Empire maintained its authority through warfare, tribute extraction, and the subjugation of neighboring peoples. Human sacrifice occupied a central position in its religious practices, with victims frequently drawn from conquered populations. Indeed, many Indigenous communities allied themselves with Hernán Cortés precisely because they sought liberation from Aztec domination.

The Spanish conquest was undoubtedly violent, and European diseases devastated Indigenous populations. Nevertheless, reducing the encounter to European aggressors confronting an innocent, harmonious world obscures the political and moral realities of the societies involved. What followed the conquest makes the Spanish experience particularly extraordinary.

At a time when slavery remained an accepted institution across much of the world, Isabella the Catholic challenged the enslavement of Indigenous Americans and insisted upon their recognition as free subjects of the Crown. Her 1504 codicil instructed her successors to ensure that Indigenous peoples were treated justly and protected from injury.

The sole existence of such obligations within the monarchy’s legal and moral framework was itself remarkable. The intellectual implications became even more extraordinary in 1550, when the Spanish Crown convened the Valladolid debate.

The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas and the scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda confronted questions that would become fundamental to modern political thought: Could conquest be morally justified? Did Indigenous peoples possess natural rights? Could their religious practices legitimize foreign domination?

Alongside the earlier writings of Francisco de Vitoria and the School of Salamanca, these debates helped establish principles that would contribute to the development of international law and the recognition of universal human dignity.

Spain had undertaken an imperial conquest, yet its own theologians and jurists were examining whether that conquest violated the moral laws governing humanity.

Spanish America was incorporated into a complex monarchy organized through viceroyalties, kingdoms, royal courts, and municipalities. Indigenous communities retained certain legal institutions, while some Indigenous noble families even received recognition of their hereditary privileges.

These territories developed political and institutional structures fundamentally different from those established under many later European colonial systems. Within decades, Spanish America possessed universities, hospitals, schools, cathedrals, and municipal governments. Universities were founded in Lima and Mexico in 1551, creating centers of higher learning centuries before many other parts of the world developed comparable institutions.

The emergence of mestizaje also distinguished Hispanic civilization. Despite enduring social hierarchies, the encounter produced societies in which European and Indigenous ancestry, languages, customs, and traditions became profoundly intertwined. Yet the greatest achievement of this enterprise cannot be understood without acknowledging its principal spiritual force: the Catholic Church.

For the missionaries who crossed the Atlantic, evangelization represented something infinitely more consequential than expanding a kingdom. They believed they were fulfilling Christ’s command to bring the Gospel to all nations, offering Indigenous peoples what Christianity understood as the promise of eternal salvation.

Missionaries established schools and hospitals, learned Indigenous languages, preserved native cultural knowledge, and challenged abuses committed by Spanish authorities. Their faith furnished both the motivation for evangelization and the moral principles through which conquest itself could be judged. The Catholic faith became the spiritual foundation of a new civilization whose churches, traditions, universities, and moral imagination endure throughout the Americas.

The United States and Hispanic America share far more than geography. Both emerged from European Christianity, inherited Western institutions, and developed societies whose futures remain deeply intertwined.

As Washington confronts Chinese expansion, Russian influence, Iranian activities, and transnational organized crime, a politically stable and economically integrated Hispanic America could become one of its most consequential partners.

A Western Hemisphere conscious of its common civilizational inheritance would possess the foundations for a renewed alliance capable of defending Western interests in an increasingly hostile world.

Five centuries after Columbus, the descendants of that encounter have inherited a civilization whose language, faith, institutions, and traditions remain inseparable from Spain. On October 12, we have every reason to celebrate the civilization Spain helped create, and every reason to be grateful for the inheritance it entrusted to us.

The United States possesses the most powerful military in the world, supported by a defense budget that exceeds those of its principal competitors and technological capabilities that few countries can match. Yet American military superiority rests on another advantage that is considerably harder to replicate: a global network of alliances that extends Washington’s strategic reach far beyond what even its extraordinary military capabilities could accomplish alone.

The map illustrates the magnitude of this advantage. NATO alone brings together 32 countries, while the Rio Treaty connects the United States to much of Latin America through a framework of collective defense. Across Europe, the Americas, and the Indo-Pacific, Washington has cultivated security relationships that provide diplomatic leverage, military interoperability, intelligence cooperation, and access to strategic territory.

Neither Russia nor China possesses anything approaching the geographic reach or institutional sophistication of this alliance system. Moscow’s Collective Security Treaty Organization remains comparatively limited, while Beijing has struggled to translate its growing military capabilities into a comparable network of formal security commitments. This asymmetry represents one of Washington’s greatest geopolitical advantages.

President Donald Trump has raised a legitimate concern about the unequal distribution of defense responsibilities, particularly within NATO. For decades, several wealthy American allies have relied disproportionately on U.S. military protection while allocating comparatively modest resources to their own defense. Requiring these countries to assume a fairer share of the burden would strengthen the alliance system rather than undermine it.

The challenge for the Trump administration is therefore to ensure that American allies contribute more without compromising the strategic advantages their partnerships provide.

Military strength gives the United States the capacity to confront its adversaries. Its alliances allow Washington to deter them across multiple continents, share the costs of collective security, and maintain a favorable balance of power.

Preserving the balance between these two pillars will be essential to ensuring that American military superiority remains a durable geopolitical advantage rather than an increasingly expensive responsibility.