US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump's in­vi­ta­tion to Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and Guyanese Pres­i­dent Ir­faan Ali to at­tend his 'Shield of the Amer­i­c­as' sum­mit of pro-Amer­i­can lead­ers on March 7 is an ex­treme­ly sig­nif­i­cant de­vel­op­ment for T&T.

Next month's meet­ing is not the first time Mr Trump has in­vit­ed re­gion­al lead­ers to meet with him. In his first term, he host­ed the lead­ers of The Ba­hamas, Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, Haiti, Ja­maica and St Lu­cia in March 2019.

The choice of the lead­ers of T&T and Guyana to at­tend the up­com­ing sum­mit is a clear in­di­ca­tion that Mr Trump per­ceives them to be his clos­est and most sup­port­ive al­lies in the Caribbean.

Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar must hope that the cal­cu­lat­ed bet she made by be­ing the first world leader to open­ly and fer­vent­ly sup­port the ini­tial US mil­i­tary strike in the Caribbean on Sep­tem­ber 2, 2025, will come up trumps for her five months and five days lat­er.

Just hours af­ter that first strike was made pub­lic, Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar de­clared that she had "no sym­pa­thy for traf­fick­ers" and that the US mil­i­tary should "kill them all vi­o­lent­ly" to pro­tect cit­i­zens from the "evil" of the nar­co­traf­fick­ers. While she was strong­ly crit­i­cised, even vil­i­fied, lo­cal­ly and through­out the re­gion, her sup­port of the US mil­i­tary in­ter­ven­tion nev­er wa­vered.

When the Amer­i­can war­ship, the USS Grave­ly, docked in Trinidad on Oc­to­ber 26, the re­sponse of the Venezuela gov­ern­ment, then ruled by de­posed pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro, was swift. It sus­pend­ed all en­er­gy agree­ments with T&T on Oc­to­ber 27 and de­clared Prime Min­is­ter Per­sad-Bisses­sar per­sona non gra­ta. That de­c­la­ra­tion was done by Mr Maduro on the spe­cif­ic rec­om­men­da­tion of his then Vice Pres­i­dent Del­cy Ro­driguez.

It is note­wor­thy, there­fore, that the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment, now head­ed by Ms Ro­driguez as in­ter­im Pres­i­dent, is­sued a state­ment on Wednes­day blast­ing the ad­dress by the T&T Prime Min­is­ter at Cari­com's 50th Heads of Gov­ern­ment meet­ing in St Kitts, as harm­ing this coun­try's eco­nom­ic in­ter­ests by "hin­der­ing the de­vel­op­ment of joint strate­gic projects of mu­tu­al in­ter­est."

That com­ment by Ms Ro­driguez, who was hand­picked by the US gov­ern­ment af­ter Maduro’s re­moval on Jan­u­ary 3, must be placed along­side Pres­i­dent Trump’s com­ment at a news con­fer­ence lat­er that day, that the US is "go­ing to run the coun­try (Venezuela) un­til such time as we can do a safe, prop­er, and ju­di­cious tran­si­tion."

If the US is, in fact, run­ning Venezuela, it would be pos­si­ble for Mr Trump to di­rect Ms Ro­driguez to co­op­er­ate with the T&T Gov­ern­ment on the Drag­on gas arrange­ments, es­pe­cial­ly as the US Of­fice of For­eign As­set Con­trol grant­ed BP and Shell gen­er­al li­cences to ne­go­ti­ate con­tin­gent con­tracts for the Drag­on and Cocuina gas fields two weeks ago.

Apart from the nat­ur­al gas arrange­ments, the oth­er card the T&T Prime Min­is­ter has placed on the ta­ble is pos­si­ble US in­volve­ment in the re­open­ing of the Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery. In her bi­lat­er­al talks with US Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio in St Kitts on Wednes­day, Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar raised the re­fin­ery is­sue with him. She said he agreed to put the T&T Gov­ern­ment on­to the US De­part­ment of En­er­gy "to as­sist us in find­ing the best part­ner to open the re­fin­ery."

If, in the talks with Pres­i­dent Trump next week, Prime Min­is­ter Per­sad-Bisses­sar can make de­fin­i­tive progress on the Drag­on gas and re­fin­ery is­sues, the cal­cu­la­tions she made last Sep­tem­ber could en­sure that T&T wins.