ABSTRACT
In October 1983, the Caribbean was confronted by the breakdown of order in Grenada occasioned by the infighting between two factions of the revolutionary government. Certain factors in the operational environment must be emphasized. Since the Grenada coup of 1979—the Commonwealth Caribbean's first unconstitutional take-over—the community, accustomed to harmony in political orientation, had been unsettled and polarized. The Caricom meeting can be quite easily recreated from the information available in primary and secondary sources. Caribbean decision-makers were acting under a certain amount of popular pressure, and this may have helped propel them toward a decisive solution. Those governments that misjudged popular reaction lost political ground as a result. The final level of foreign policy making is the implementation of policy. Crisis decision-making obviously differs quite a bit from day-to-day decision-making: Decisions must be taken in an atmosphere of urgency, sometimes secrecy, often with limited information available.
