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AS YOU will have noticed, there has been more than the usual amount of TT in world news recently. And yet somehow not nearly as much as perhaps there ought to be.
Case in point: an in-depth Wall Street Journal article published last week that described TT’s part in the ongoing US-Venezuela stand-off. The article is intended to get the WSJ’s readership up to speed on the nature of TT’s current government, its policy goals regarding relations with the US and Venezuela, and its recent full-throated support for whatever it is the Trump administration thinks it’s currently achieving in the Caribbean Sea.
The piece includes commentary from Bhoe Tewarie and Stuart Young – who both highlight the risks inherent in Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s decision to be Donald Trump’s most aggressive ally in the region – and it quotes the TT PM at length. But those quotes are all drawn from previously published interviews. The WSJ tried to get someone to speak directly for the TT government’s position but “Persad Bissessar’s office as well as the ministers of energy and foreign affairs didn’t respond to calls seeking comment.”
A Prime Minister can certainly be busy. So can Cabinet ministers. But when no senior member of the TT government will come forward to provide a simple outline of the country’s position on one of the most significant geopolitical stories of the present moment – that’s a choice.
Trying not to comment on the most significant foreign policy issue your nation has faced in decades is not bold leadership, but it is prudent.
Mostly because TT’s policy of the moment is “whatever Donald Trump says he’s doing, we support,” and the US-Venezuela confrontation has entered a phase where it is a little difficult to figure out what Donald Trump actually wants to do.
This might be because Trump himself is unsure of what he wants to do.
The most plausible reporting and analysis of US-Venezuela relations suggests that the Trump administration was about to sign a deal with the Maduro government in which the US got access to Venezuela’s massive horde of natural resources and agreed to leave Maduro and his associates alone. But US Secretary of State Marco Rubio successfully upended that deal and persuaded his president that the Venezuelan government had to go because…narco-trafficking.
It is suggested that Donald Trump genuinely wants to pursue cartels and drug traffickers, so the way to get him to support a policy is to connect it somehow to a war on drugs. Which is how we arrived at the bizarre place in history where we're expected to believe America’s behemoth aircraft carrier, USS Gerald Ford, is heading our way to chase speedboats around the Gulf of Paria.
Except it’s not. At the time of writing, “the most lethal combat platform in the world” (literally how the US Navy describes its pride and joy) was stalled off the coast of North Africa, apparently transformed from a terrifying instrument of war to an 1100-foot sun lounger for Morocco to enjoy.
On one hand, we’re told there are US attack drones patrolling the airspace between TT and Venezuela, and the Americans seem to be sweeping the mothballs out of an old naval base in Puerto Rico. Conversely, Trump has recently appeared less aggressive in his rhetoric when discussing Venezuela, and 4,500 sailors aboard the world’s largest aircraft carrier are leafing through Casablanca guidebooks.
Little wonder the TT government’s policy position has moved from “Kill them all violently” to “New phone, who dis?”
Weeks ago, Latin America commentator James Bosworth cautioned no one ought to be making confident predictions about intentions and outcomes in the US-Venezuela showdown, mostly because both Trump and Maduro are petulant and impulsive. And the only policy either reliably holds to is the promotion of their own power and influence.
Whenever the US and Venezuela settle their beef, TT’s next-door neighbour will either be controlled by an even more paranoid and despotic Nicolás Maduro (now entirely justified in his conviction that he has something to be paranoid about) or a new Venezuelan government that will be trying to prove it’s not an American sock puppet.
The TT government is rooting for the latter, but it’s hard to muster enthusiasm for a choice that the historian Armando Chaguaceda has described as “between a hypothetical risk and an ongoing tragedy.”
Faced with no particularly good outcomes, perhaps TT’s PM is wise to instruct her ministers to heed the advice of Irish poet Seamus Heaney: “Whatever you say, say nothing.”
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