Unit­ed States Navy war­ship USS Grave­ly is now an­chored here in Port-of-Spain, in a pe­ri­od of anx­ious con­cern about phys­i­cal con­flict break­ing out be­tween the US and Venezuela, and the pos­si­ble fall­out for Trinidad and To­ba­go.

The ma­jor source of wor­ry is that T&T can be­come a stag­ing point for the US if it en­gages in a war against Venezuela. Such a war can be­come a nat­ur­al fol­low-through to the US bomb­ing of small ves­sels mak­ing their way be­tween the South Amer­i­can main­land and un­known des­ti­na­tions with al­leged drug car­goes.

As this ed­i­to­r­i­al ap­pears, the build-up to the ex­cite­ment of cit­i­zens vis­it­ing the city to see the USS Grave­ly will be bub­bling over. That nat­ur­al cu­rios­i­ty of the Tri­ni will be stim­u­lat­ed and en­cour­aged by what is sure to be a grand pub­lic re­la­tions dis­play on board the war­ship. And no doubt, there will be plans for crew mem­bers to come ashore to per­form ac­tiv­i­ties, in­clud­ing a more fo­cused train­ing ex­er­cise with T&T De­fence Force of­fi­cers.

Notwith­stand­ing nat­ur­al fears which have been build­ing over the last few weeks, it is un­like­ly that there will be a strike on Venezuela from the ves­sel as it lies in T&T wa­ters. What its pres­ence here is no doubt de­signed to do, how­ev­er, is to send a mes­sage to Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro that this de­stroy­er has the ca­pac­i­ty to do sig­nif­i­cant dam­age to the main­land if nec­es­sary.

Fur­ther­more, it is al­so a sign that the US has, in T&T Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, a strong al­ly in this part of the Caribbean re­gion.

As is well known, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has said the re­cent bomb­ings of ves­sels are to pre­vent drugs from Venezuela get­ting to the US, due to his claims that the drug traf­fick­ing trade em­anates from the Bo­li­var­i­an Re­pub­lic. The US Pres­i­dent has placed a US$50 mil­lion boun­ty on Maduro’s head as a re­sult of this. The Venezue­lan leader has, in turn, de­nied that drug traf­fick­ing orig­i­nates from his coun­try. Mean­while, the Unit­ed Na­tions re­port on drugs and traf­fick­ing has iden­ti­fied Colom­bia as the ma­jor source of the drug ship­ments go­ing north to the US, and north east to Eu­rope, and through the Pa­cif­ic Ocean. Thus far, the US has not pro­duced ev­i­dence to in­dict Venezue­lan au­thor­i­ties on its drug traf­fick­ing claims.

In­ter­na­tion­al re­la­tions ex­perts have iden­ti­fied the in­tent of regime change in Cara­cas as the far more log­i­cal mo­tive for the cur­rent build-up of arms against Venezuela. It’s one which will open up that coun­try’s en­er­gy re­sources, said to be the largest in the world, for full and easy ex­ploita­tion by the US transna­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions.

“The land is go­ing to be next. And we may go to the Sen­ate; we may go to the Con­gress and tell them about it, but I can’t imag­ine they’d have any prob­lem with it,” Trump said dur­ing a me­dia con­fer­ence af­ter a round­table with mem­bers of his ad­min­is­tra­tion last week.

There can be no oth­er mean­ing to such very di­rect state­ments by Pres­i­dent Trump.

The na­tion­al pop­u­la­tion here sim­ply can­not al­low Gov­ern­ment to car­ry on with its al­ready com­mit­ted po­si­tion to al­low the US to use T&T as a stag­ing point. No promise of keep­ing the Drag­on alive is worth the hu­man cat­a­stro­phe which could oc­cur here if things do not go the way Trump is plan­ning it.