Noble: Riding a tiger to catch a Dragon—has PM considered implications of inserting T&T into US-Venezuela conflict?

Our honourable Prime Minister, Mrs Kamla Persad-Bissessar, decided to mount a tiger to get access to the promised riches of the Dragon.

We need the gas from the Dragon Field because our local output and reserves are declining, and we will be in a crisis by 2027. We also need it to sustain our voracious appetite for foreign exchange.

Despite the comments we see on Facebook and other news sites, we are one nation. While the maps of the Elections and Boundaries Commission’s electoral results may show a sharp division of voting preferences, we are not living in separate communities.

According to the same electoral results, people who vote for different parties live side by side.

It is folly for our government to believe it can govern for its people and force others to submit to its agenda. While it may be psychologically soothing to appear to be dominating or punishing the opposite party, the pain is also felt by ordinary people, who voted for them.

We witness what are essentially government announcements posted first on the governing party’s social media page. Parliament is now a mockery. Every day is another chaotic affair, unseen before except during Covid.

We saw what is essentially a coup in the naming of the chief justice. In her statement about the process, Mrs Bissessar said: “I agree Your Excellency should select a judge from the Court of Appeal bench to replace Chief Justice Ivor Archie. I have no preference.”

The process does not require either the prime minister or the opposition leader to state a preference.

We have passed the buck for appointing the person to the third-highest position in the land, without the care of naming the nominee. Those who noted the one-day consultation period when CJ Archie was appointed fail to mention that CJ Satnarine Sharma had been on a three-month leave before retirement.

We were greeted with a jaw-dropping response from the Prime Minister when the Law Association had the temerity to object to the process. How we miss a Reginald Dumas to challenge the concept and practice of consultation at the Privy Council level.

We can itemise other instances of unorthodox behaviour, but it is more fruitful to examine the possible roots.

Twenty days before the General Elections, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio informed then-Prime Minister Stuart Young that the US had revoked two OFAC licences for offshore gas projects with Venezuela.

Three months after Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar declared the Dragon gas deal “dead” —and five months after the revocation of the two Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) licences to explore the Dragon and Cocuina-Manakin fields in Venezuelan waters—the United States government reversed its decision.

The timing of the withdrawal of the licences brings to mind the James Comey-Hillary Clinton affair. To this day, there are arguments about the importance of that decision to outcome of the US election.

What effect did the withdrawal of those licences have on our elections? Nobody knows. But we do know that despite Young’s affirmation, he was not a ‘bestie’ with Rubio. Mrs Persad Bissessar is.

Look at what Rubio got! While hugging up Mrs Bissessar, a mandatory share of the proceeds for US companies was inserted into the deal. We should keep our eyes open. Our Point Fortin plant may eventually only get a fee for processing the gas into liquids.

Rubio upstaged Richard Grenell, who was originally working the Venezuela issue. Mr Grenell and his supporters argued that diplomatic negotiation was the best way to protect American economic interests in Venezuela.

Grenell had squared off against Rubio over various issues in this administration, including how to get Nicolas Maduro to release American hostages. Grenell got some US hostages freed, but that was not enough.

Rubio’s position was simple. Mr Rubio argues that Mr Maduro is an illegitimate leader who oversees the export of drugs to the United States, which he says poses an “imminent threat”.

Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has long argued that removing Maduro from power will weaken Venezuela’s close ally, the Communist government in Cuba. The intelligence agency’s director, John Ratcliffe, and Stephen Miller, Mr Trump’s chief domestic policy adviser, both support Mr Rubio’s approach.

“Trump had, in many conversations and in meetings with different people, emphasised that he really only cared about [Venezuela’s] oil,” said a US businessman with longstanding ties to Venezuela and close knowledge of the White House’s policy. “But Rubio was able to drum up this ‘narco-terrorist’ rhetoric and get Trump to pivot completely. The U-turn really reflects Rubio’s expanded influence in the administration.”

Cuba has long been a target for political reasons in Florida.

Now, it is part of the reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine. Angelo Rivero Santos, a Latin American studies professor at Georgetown University and former diplomat in Venezuela’s embassy in Washington, commented:

“It’s not only Venezuela. When you look at their statements on the Panama Canal, at the impositions of tariffs on Brazil, the latest spat with the Colombian government, not to mention the military presence in the Caribbean.”

It is in this context that one connects Cuba to the Venezuelan situation. The desire is to have more Trump-friendly leadership in the Caribbean.

Would Trinidad and Tobago, under Young, have agreed to such a plan to remove the leadership of both Venezuela and Cuba?

Rubio met with five Venezuelan opposition leaders in May who secretly fled to the United States, and he has praised the opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, the “Venezuelan Iron Lady”.

María Corina Machado, the leader of the Vente Venezuela opposition group, openly supports the idea of foreign military intervention to unseat Maduro. She partly blamed drug cartels that she said represent a shadow power network within the country for the failure of the uprising during Trump’s first term.

It should be noted that both Maduro and Corina Machado hold the same position about Venezuela’s claim on Essequibo.

This Rubio-Corina Machado connection may explain why she complimented President Trump after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

How much did our Prime Minister know about the larger plan of regime change when she embraced the narrative about drug-running pirogues? Did she forget our Coast Guard man who died in a drug submarine in March?

Senior police sources who have been assisting in the investigation said that the semi-submersible, or low-profile vessel, also known as a “narco-sub”, was transporting a large shipment of illegal drugs.

The narco-submarine was said to be in the waters between Trinidad and Tobago and Grenada. This method of transporting drugs is more efficient.

Is it that ‘bestie’ relationship that causes her and some of her cohort to be cavalier and rude in her treatment of us, the citizens of this land? What else has been promised to her, or to the US by her?

Is the request to Grenada a feint to have us cede Chaguaramas for a second time?

It is appropriate to note the warning of the Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Yván Gil: “We are willing to discuss everything that needs to be discussed with a neighbouring country, a country that is an economic power, a military power.”

He added that a significant conflict would lead to “excessive migration” and economic collapse that would “destabilise the entire region”.

Andrés Izarra, a former Chávez minister now living in exile, said he foresaw a Somalia-style debacle if the US raided Caracas, the Venezuelan capital.

What will happen to our maritime trade then? What will happen to our economy? Will we be able to repel illegal immigration? Will we then be set on the road to a ratings downgrade and possibly an IMF intervention? Will the US provide help to bolster our country’s economy?

Our citizens appear fixated with the US helicopters. However, in 1993, two Night Stalker helicopters were shot down with rocket launchers and five members were killed during the Battle of Mogadishu, the two-day skirmish remembered in Ridley Scott’s film Black Hawk Down.

“Despite their incredible access to hi-tech gear, weapons, support, communications, a man in a T-shirt and jeans with an AK-47 can bring down your helicopter.”

Should Mrs Bissessar be expecting a regime change in Venezuela, she should read the history books. Not everything is as clean and straightforward as the Grenada invasion.

She must recall the CIA’s 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, which resulted in the 1962 missile crisis. Military interventions do not always lead to democracy, but more often to dictators. Haiti is an example.

She needs to recognise that Venezuela is not a small country and that it has already withstood a military coup instigated by Trump’s first administration.

Colombia is now a target, and this does not augur well for the Trump administration. Colombia was a close US ally.

As one former US Ambassador, James B Story, said: “We have gotten more intelligence from Colombia on counternarcotics than we’ve given to the Colombians.

“That intel allows us to go and take a boat down with the Coast Guard. Then we obtain the drugs. We’re able to know then where the drugs came from.”

Can Mrs Bissessar ride the tiger? Or will we lose our favoured position?

Henry Kissinger famously said: “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” Kissinger is the icon that Donald Trump likened Rubio to.

What should we make of the military exercises? Are they the usual Tradewinds operation on steroids?

Robert Evan Ellis, a Latin America expert who advised Mike Pompeo—the secretary of state during Trump’s first term—said the Caribbean exercises were one strand of “a carefully calibrated military messaging” campaign to pile pressure on Maduro’s regime as part of a “controlled negotiation” designed to advance US interests.

While our country reserves its position on the Caribbean being a ‘zone of peace’, the Brazilian leader does not. The prospect of a US attack has spooked regional governments, with Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, warning against outside meddling in a “continent free of weapons of mass destruction”.

“Foreign intervention can cause more damage than it seeks to prevent,” said Lula, whose military commanders recently sent 10,000 troops to Brazil’s northern border with Venezuela for exercises.

China did not install a rig in Maracaibo to jettison that investment. Russia is a known ally of Venezuela.

Should we not, like Thailand or Indonesia—which were confronted with a choice between China and Russia—have weighed the situation before committing too early and being held hostage?

If Mrs Bissessar is concerned about crime, she can turn the pages back to when the then-Prime Minister Patrick Manning created a plan to secure our porous borders. She could review whether her plan that replaced Manning’s has worked.

She could read the 2024 Report of the Joint Select Committee (JSC) on National Security which said: “Trinidad and Tobago suffers from a security crisis and a border control crisis owing to the lack of efficiency of the Customs and Excise Division and the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard; and a gun retrieval crisis, owing to the lack of efficiency of the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service.”

The report also noted that the traffickers in contraband were aided by corrupt law enforcement personnel.

If that is too much reading or too much work, then we are doomed to ride the tiger. Will the tiger help us with our crime problem? Will we get the Dragon?

“Or what king would go to war against another king without first sitting down with his counsellors to discuss whether his army of 10,000 could defeat the 20,000 soldiers marching against him?” Luke 14:31.