This past week, Bolivia and the United States engaged in a tit-for-tat expulsion of ambassadors and the contagion appeared set to spread to Venezuela where President Hugo Chávez said he would oust Washington's envoy in solidarity with Bolivia's president, Evo Morales.

And as if that was not sufficient tension for the region, there was last weekend's development of a Russian long-range tactical TU160 bomber arriving in Venezuela for what the Russians called tests flights over neutral waters. Then later in the year, a Russian naval squadron is due to arrive in the region for joint exercises with the Venezuelans.

At one level, this military display by Moscow might be read as an assertion by the Kremlin that a resurgent Russia is back. But read together with other events, in this hemisphere and the Caucasus, there could well be good reason for the concern of those people who fear that we might be witnessing the first flicker in the ignition of a new Cold War. Or, should things get out of hand, something far worse.

beneficial relations

Jamaica, and, of course, its partners in the Caribbean Community (Caricom), cannot stand aloof from these events. This regional community has good and largely mutually beneficial relations with all the protagonists.

Moreover, Jamaica is well aware of the trauma of the last Cold War, and has the scars to prove it. And they remain raw, deep and ugly.

It is a complex mix that has created this potentially dangerous cocktail. Not least of the ingredients is the re-emergence across Latin America of leftist and left-leaning leaders, bent on challenging post-Cold War orthodoxies and American dominance in the hemisphere.

President Chávez is the clear leader of the pack, who not only engages his rhetoric to weaken Washington's influence, but because of high oil prices, has the resources to support his effort. He has been generous to the region and Jamaica, too, has benefited.

Chávez has clearly inspired leaders like Morales, the first person from the majority of land-locked Bolivia's indigenous population to win the presidency. Unsurprisingly, President Morales' programmes of nationalisation and efforts at redressing historic economic imbalances in the country with redistribution policies have been resisted. Morales' opponents have led violent demonstrations, which, the president says, are supported and even directed, by the United States.

robust projection

But even moderately left leaders, like Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, also have concerns about what they see as a more robust projection of American power in the hemisphere. Of particular concern is the deployment, for the first time in nearly 60 years, of the US Navy's Fourth Fleet to direct Washington's naval force in the Caribbean and Latin America. The Americans insist that the primary role of the fleet is drug interdiction and humanitarian support.

Russia is an opportunistic beneficiary of hemispheric tensions, particularly at the time of its own estrangement from the West after its affray in Georgia. It sees moves by Georgia and other former Soviet allies to join NATO as a military encirclement and encroachment into its backyard. Moscow sees America's dispatch of warships with aid to Georgia as provocative. Its war planes in Venezuela is the response.

Caricom does not have the power to dictate to the protagonists, but it can be among the calming voices of reason, steering people way from an abyss.