May this Christ­mas sea­son be a time of peace, good­will, joy, hap­pi­ness, har­mo­ny and con­tent­ment. For Chris­tians, this is a time of cel­e­brat­ing the birth of the ba­by Je­sus and the mean­ing of His com­ing for the sal­va­tion and re­demp­tion of mankind. For oth­ers, the spir­it of good­will is em­braced with fam­i­ly, friends and cel­e­bra­tion.

May you all be fo­cused and res­olute in the com­ing year.

For all of us, 1.5 mil­lion at most, who live on these tiny is­lands, To­ba­go and Trinidad, and claim 18 oth­er is­lands around us, in­clud­ing Sol­da­do, which is a rock, as our do­main, this is home, wher­ev­er else we may roam. And for the vast ma­jor­i­ty, T&T is the on­ly home we have and the home we cher­ish. With the hos­til­i­ty to mi­gra­tion in the in­dus­tri­alised world, our fo­cus should be on build­ing a sus­tain­able na­tion, as self-suf­fi­cient as pos­si­ble, and with mu­tu­al­ly sup­port­ive and re­li­able part­ner­ships, re­gion­al­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, which help T&T to thrive.

Cir­cum­stances have made this Christ­mas sea­son more anx­ious than most. We could have mil­i­tary con­fronta­tion or a war in Venezuela, a neigh­bour­ing coun­try sev­en miles away, with whom we have some shared his­to­ry, and from where, per­haps 60,000 mi­grants have come to live among us, flee­ing eco­nom­ic hard­ship and po­lit­i­cal op­pres­sion and look­ing for a bet­ter life. We might have had at one time, up to 100,000, but some used T&T as a step­ping­stone to oth­er coun­tries where they might have fam­i­ly, friends or oth­er con­nec­tions.

Cit­i­zens and res­i­dents of T&T, who live here, spread out in just over 600 com­mu­ni­ties and 450,000 house­holds, based on the 2011 cen­sus (so it might be more now) have lived, ex­pe­ri­enced and known bet­ter days.

We have had our cy­cles of booms as a pe­tro­le­um- based econ­o­my, when get­ting and spend­ing char­ac­terised the cul­ture.

We came through a very rough pe­ri­od from about 1983 to 1993, when boom turned to bust, but in spite of hard­ship, a storm­ing of Par­lia­ment and an at­tempt­ed coup, re­spon­si­ble eco­nom­ic and fi­nan­cial man­age­ment got us back to growth and, as an­oth­er boom came, we got to pros­per­i­ty and ex­cess once more.

But we have been in an­oth­er cy­cle of bust since 2014, wors­en­ing as our oil and gas pro­duc­tion kept falling, af­fect­ing out­put from the petro­chem­i­cal and LNG sec­tors.

Over the decade from 2015, our for­eign re­serves have been de­plet­ing, our Her­itage and Sta­b­li­sa­tion fund has been con­stant­ly threat­ened, and we have made lim­it­ed strides in di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion and mov­ing away from en­er­gy rev­enue de­pen­dence. This has cre­at­ed a for­eign ex­change cri­sis, but it is not a sit­u­a­tion that can con­tin­ue for much longer. There has to be a dra­mat­ic re­duc­tion in im­ports, a de­ci­sive in­crease in non-en­er­gy ex­ports, new non-en­er­gy, ex­port-fo­cused in­vest­ments, and a sys­tem­at­ic in­crease in the flow of tourists in­to the coun­try. This we must do even as we wres­tle with the en­er­gy short­age and step up plans to re­solve our en­er­gy chal­lenges and rev­enue short­fall. The un­cer­tain­ty of pos­si­ble mil­i­tary con­flict makes it hard­er to achieve these things.

The es­ca­lat­ing con­flict be­tween US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro has made it im­pos­si­ble for T&T to pro­ceed with­out mak­ing hard choic­es and tak­ing high risks.

In align­ing un­apolo­get­i­cal­ly with the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion, which has now drawn out this con­flict with Maduro and tak­en it to the point of an over­whelm­ing block­ade, Pres­i­dent Trump can­not af­ford to leave Maduro in­tact. He can­not with­draw. For Trump, Maduro’s fall is his min­i­mum re­quire­ment.

The ques­tion is what will regime change take be­yond max­i­mum pres­sure? Will it re­quire mil­i­tary ac­tion from the air, sea or on land? And if things get that far, what will it mean in terms of im­pact and con­se­quence for T&T?

There is a fur­ther ques­tion: what will post-Maduro gov­er­nance arrange­ments mean with or with­out mil­i­tary in­ter­ven­tion? Who will be in charge in Venezuela and how sta­ble will Venezuela be? What are the at­ten­dant risks? How will T&T cope with this lev­el of un­cer­tain­ty? What­ev­er rhetoric comes out of Venezuela, it is US pres­sure and re­lief from US sanc­tions that will ul­ti­mate­ly get T&T any nat­ur­al gas from Man­a­tee and Drag­on. The lev­el of T&T de­pen­dence on the US for nat­ur­al gas re­lief, mil­i­tary pro­tec­tion and na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty is high.

The US is carv­ing out al­liances in the hemi­sphere. US Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio has iden­ti­fied T&T, Guyana and Ja­maica as al­lies. In such a sce­nario, there is no need for T&T to widen the rift with­in Cari­com, even if our Prime Min­is­ter feels that it does need shak­ing up.