Friends,
Good afternoon.
Thank you, all of you, for being here. Some of you have travelled thousands of miles. Some of you travelled from Paradise Island. We are grateful to every one of you.
I want to do three things this afternoon.
First, I want to be honest about the world we are living in.
Second, I want to tell you clearly what The Bahamas wants from that world, and what small island states want with us.
And third, I want to ask for your help.
Along the way, I want to show you why this week’s theme is timely. Orange, Blue and Green Economies, New Frontiers for Trade and Economic Development – I believe it holds the answer to the questions we have come here to ask.
Let me start with something every Bahamian child knows.
Everything we need comes to us across water. Our food, our fuel and our medicine arrive by sea. Our visitors arrive by air. Our faith, our music and our ancestors crossed the ocean to reach these shores, many of them in chains.
So an islander learns two things early. You learn humility about what you can do alone. And you learn confidence in what you can do with others. For us, the sea that surrounds us is the road that connects us.
Hold on to that idea. I will come back to it.
Here is a fact I find remarkable.
On the tenth of July, 1973, the day our flag went up for the first time, Sir Lynden Pindling sat down and signed a letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. One sentence. It said The Bahamas accepted the obligations of the UN Charter, and solemnly undertook to fulfil them.
Think about the timing.
Our central bank was still a year away. Our defence force was seven years away. The last census had counted fewer than one hundred and seventy thousand of us, spread across seven hundred islands and thousands of cays.
And on the first day, before almost anything else, we signed up to the rules.
That was a bet. A small country with no army bet its future on a simple idea: that rules would protect the weak as well as the strong.
Ten weeks later we became the one hundred and thirty-fifth member of the United Nations. On the first of October 1973, Sir Lynden addressed the General Assembly.
I reread that speech this week. I would encourage you to do the same. Parts of it could have been written last month.
He opened with our Constitution, which proclaims a nation in which “no Man, Woman or Child shall ever be Slave or Bondsman.” He warned that if peace came to depend on physical power alone, it would remain the province of a privileged few. And he told the Assembly that the aspirations of the Bahamian people were “no less real or immediate than those of the big nations.”
Then he offered one of our seven hundred islands as a home for the United Nations, or any of its agencies.
For the record, the offer still stands.
He also left us a line our Foreign Ministry still carries. No man, no nation is an island unto itself.
The leader of a nation made entirely of islands told the world that no nation is an island. Every small state that has made it since has lived by that sentence.
So let us be clear-eyed about where we are.
Conflict has returned to regions that believed it settled. Supply chains are being redrawn around security. Trade disputes are multiplying faster than the institutions built to resolve them. Commitments on climate and development are under strain in capitals on every continent.
None of this belongs to any one country. Every great power, East and West, is recalculating its interests. That is what great powers do.
For small states, the effects arrive early, and they arrive hard. We have been placed on lists we had no hand in writing. We have watched correspondent banks pull back from our region.
Let us also be honest about something else. The rules were always applied imperfectly. Yet an imperfect referee protects the smallest player on the field more than anyone. When the referee leaves, the smallest player gets hurt first.
This is an old problem. Two and a half thousand years ago, Thucydides (thoo·si·duh·deez) recorded what Athens told the small island of Melos: the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. Melos refused to submit. Athens killed its men and enslaved its women and children.
The UN Charter was our attempt to prove Athens wrong. It gave the island of Melos a seat in the Assembly.
And here is one more thing from that 1973 speech. Even then, a leading journal had declared that the United Nations was out of the mainstream of world politics.
Sound familiar?
Sir Lynden’s answer was that the great powers would define the mainstream only if the rest of us passively allowed it. That answer still holds.
So the question for this week is a practical one. If the old certainties are fading, how do small island states protect what we have built, and build what we still need?
The first step is to know exactly what we want. The second is to know where we will find it. I will come to the second shortly. It is printed on every banner in this building.
Now let me tell you what we want. And forgive me if I speak from the heart, because this is the part of my address to you I care about most.
When I was a boy on Cat Island, almost everything that reached us came on the mailboat.
My father began his working life at Hobby Horse Hall, cleaning stables and riding as a jockey. He later became a firefighter. He was an ordinary man who worked hard to provide for his family. He would send things home to us on that boat.
I tell you this because that is what aspiration looks like in an island nation. Someone who loves you, on the other side of the water, making sure something good reaches you.
Every Bahamian family has a story like mine. A parent who crossed the water for work. A child who waited on the dock. A grandmother who stood in line to vote in January 1967, so that her grandchildren would one day govern themselves.
When I tell you what The Bahamas wants, I am speaking for them.
We want security. We want the fisherman in Andros to head out at dawn knowing his waters are protected. We want every family, in every settlement, on every island, to sleep safely at night.
We want prosperity that Bahamians own. We want the young woman in Exuma with a business idea to find the capital to build it at home. We want our brightest graduates to see their future here, on the islands that raised them.
We want a voice. Wherever decisions about our future are made, in the Security Council or in the boardrooms that set the price of our capital, we want a Bahamian at the table, speaking with a Bahamian voice.
And we want to give something back. We want to be a trusted partner to the world, and a place where nations come to meet and make peace.
The small island states of the world share a wider aspiration, and we stand with them.
We want to survive. In September 2019, Hurricane Dorian sat over Abaco and Grand Bahama for the better part of two days. It caused damage and losses estimated at about a quarter of our national output. Some of our neighbours never came home. For our sister nations in the Pacific, the threat is the sea itself, rising to claim the very ground a nation stands on.
When we speak about climate, we are speaking about whether our children will inherit a homeland.
We want to be measured fairly. A country can look wealthy on paper and still lose a quarter of its economy to a single storm. Finance on fair terms has to reflect vulnerability as well as income.
We want justice, for the history that shaped this region and for a crisis we did little to cause.
And above all, we want dignity.
We want what Sir Lynden asked for in 1973: that the hopes of our people be treated as just as real, and just as urgent, as the hopes of any nation on earth.
Our country is small. Our people dream as large as anyone alive.
That was the promise of 1945. It was the promise Sir Lynden signed on our first day. It is the promise we ask the world to keep in 2026.
Which brings me to the third thing I promised you. The ask.
An aspiration is a promise a country makes to its own future. And like any promise worth making, it depends on others keeping faith with it.
So I will be direct. Help us achieve our aspiration.
And here is where this week’s theme comes in. Orange, blue and green. We call them economies. I prefer to think of them as frontiers: places where a small island state holds a real advantage, and where partnership can turn that advantage into trade, investment and jobs.
The blue frontier is our ocean. Our ocean territory is many times the size of our land. Our seagrass meadows and coral systems hold answers the world’s scientists need. Bring your universities and research institutions here, and work alongside Bahamian scientists.
And remember what Sir Lynden told the Assembly in 1973: some of the busiest shipping lanes on earth run through our archipelago. Those lanes make The Bahamas a natural hub for shipping, logistics and transshipment across the Americas, a short hop from the largest consumer market in the world.
The green frontier is our land and our energy. In that same 1973 speech, Sir Lynden told the world The Bahamas was a major importer of food. Fifty-three years later, we still import most of what we eat. Every imported meal is a vulnerability. Invest with us in sustainable farming, agro-processing and clean energy. For an island, food security is national security.
The orange frontier is our culture. Our music, our art, our Junkanoo, our food, our storytellers and our designers. Culture carries identity, and identity travels where tariffs cannot reach. Partner with our artists, our festivals and our cultural enterprises, and help them reach your markets.
Orange, blue and green. Culture, ocean and land. Each frontier takes something that makes us distinct and turns it into trade the world values. Each one gives a partner a reason to invest in The Bahamas that will outlast any change in the political weather. And each one brings our aspiration within reach.
Beyond the frontiers, there is one more way you can help.
Help us stand together. When Vanuatu, a country of about three hundred thousand people, took the question of climate change to the International Court of Justice for an Advisory Opinion, the Court ruled unanimously last July that states have legal obligations to protect the climate system. That is what law and coalition can do for small nations. Stand with our coalitions.
And in return, here is our commitment to you.
The Bahamas will keep its word. We will honour our treaties. We will pay our dues. We will keep our courts independent and our public service clean. We will meet the standards we ask of others.
That is why The Bahamas is seeking a seat on the United Nations Security Council for 2032 and 2033. When the table is under strain, the world needs more people who believe in it. Help us take our seat.
To our friends in the United States, I speak as a neighbour. About fifty miles of water separate our nearest island from Florida. You are our largest trading partner, the home of most of the visitors who keep our economy moving, and our partner in keeping our shared waters safe.
This year you mark two hundred and fifty years of independence. A young republic once explained itself to the world out of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Few nations did more to build the post-war order of rules and institutions. When America leads within that order, small nations everywhere are safer. And so is America.
To every larger nation in this room, I say this with respect. Many of you helped write the rules now under strain. Those rules have served great powers as faithfully as they have served small ones. The order that protects The Bahamas protects you too.
And to the investors and business leaders here this week: the orange, blue and green frontiers are open. The Bahamas is stable and governed by the rule of law. In a world like this one, that may be the most valuable offer on the table.
Let me finish where I started. With the sea.
The rules-based order is a habit. Habits last only as long as people keep practising them, especially when practice is hard. Aspiration works the same way. A country keeps its aspiration alive by acting on it, every day.
In 1973, Sir Lynden ended his speech by admitting that some of his hopes might sound Utopian. Then he said every one of them could be achieved, if we had the collective will.
Look around this room. The ministers. The diplomats. The investors. The scientists. The journalists. That collective will is sitting right here.
The frontiers are mapped. Orange, blue and green. The partners are here. What remains is the choice to act.
So let us choose it.
No man, no nation is an island unto itself. A nation of islands may be best placed to remind the world of that. And a world that remembers it will find in The Bahamas a partner ready to help with its aspirations, just as we now ask you to help with ours.
Our national motto calls us forward, upward, onward, together. This week, I invite every one of you to move with us.
It is now my honour and my privilege to declare Diplomatic Week 2026 officially open.
God bless you all, and may God bless the Commonwealth of The Bahamas.