Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and her Gov­ern­ment are ob­vi­ous­ly, and per­haps jus­ti­fi­ably so, pleased with the re­sults of the strat­e­gy pur­sued to have Unit­ed States Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio say he will “sup­port” T&T’s bid for a new Of­fice of For­eign As­sets Con­trol (OFAC) li­cence. Hav­ing the li­cence in hand is one step to fi­nal­i­sa­tion of the arrange­ments to al­low Venezuela’s Drag­on gas to be processed here; but there are sev­er­al oth­ers.

Prime Min­is­ter Per­sad-Bisses­sar adopt­ed the path of damn­ing Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro and his gov­ern­ment for al­low­ing the drugs trade to pass through Venezuela on the way to the Unit­ed States. Sub­servient­ly, the T&T Gov­ern­ment sup­port­ed with vigour the dead­ly strikes of the US gun­boats made on a few pirogues and the pas­sen­gers of the ves­sels, fol­low­ing the US claim that the ves­sels were tak­ing the drugs to the main­land.

The PM sub­se­quent­ly dissed and triv­i­alised Cari­com’s pol­i­cy of keep­ing the re­gion as a Zone of Peace, and went as far as sup­port­ing the US den­i­gra­tion of Maduro as be­ing part of the lit­tle-known Tren de Aragua gang. For that and more, the US placed a US$50 mil­lion boun­ty on Maduro's head.

Our Prime Min­is­ter and her ad­vi­sors seem­ing­ly cal­cu­lat­ed that such over­whelm­ing sup­port for the US in its at­tempt to have Maduro re­moved from of­fice, would earn the Gov­ern­ment in Port-of-Spain a sec­ond OFAC li­cence.

It should be con­sid­ered, though, that what has gone on up to this point is mere­ly the first stage of the move to have oil from Venezuela re­fined here.

The first, and most im­por­tant re­al­i­ty, is that any deal must have the im­pri­matur of Pres­i­dent Trump, as it is his war against the Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent which mat­ters. And it must be re­mem­bered that Sec­re­tary of State Ru­bio gave the as­sur­ance to then prime min­is­ter Stu­art Young that the US would do noth­ing to dam­age the T&T econ­o­my; that as­sur­ance did not hold.

Re­gard­ing the like­ly re­ac­tion of Cara­cas to the dis­course be­tween T&T and the US in re­cent weeks, it’s dif­fi­cult to ac­cept that the own­ers of the nat­ur­al gas be­ing ne­go­ti­at­ed for, i.e., the gov­ern­ment and peo­ple of Venezuela, will agree to the stat­ed US po­si­tion that they must not ben­e­fit in any sig­nif­i­cant man­ner from the fi­nalised arrange­ments with the Per­sad-Bisses­sar ad­min­is­tra­tion.

To agree to al­low him­self to be played as a fool by Pres­i­dent Trump, sup­port­ed by Prime Min­is­ter Per­sad-Bisses­sar, will take a lot of swal­low­ing by the Venezue­lan leader. The bot­tom line is that Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar and her Cab­i­net can­not be cer­tain that the strat­e­gy used has worked; there is a long road ahead which re­quires far more than En­er­gy Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal be­ing pre­pared to go to Venezuela.

The oth­er most im­por­tant el­e­ment of the match-play is whether Pres­i­dent Trump will con­cede to al­low­ing Pres­i­dent Maduro any mea­sure of eco­nom­ic suc­cess and the strength­en­ing of his po­lit­i­cal po­si­tion in­side Venezuela, to en­able him to re­main in of­fice.

There are, there­fore, many bridges to cross be­fore Prime Min­is­ter Per­sad-Bisses­sar and her Gov­ern­ment can claim suc­cess for the strat­e­gy and po­si­tions adopt­ed to gain a new OFAC li­cence to be able to ac­cept and re­fine Venezue­lan gas here.