Trinidad and To­ba­go’s ex­clu­sion from US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s meet­ing with the Caribbean lead­ers rep­re­sents a di­min­ished view of this coun­try by the Unit­ed States, ac­cord­ing to for­mer For­eign Af­fairs Min­is­ter Ralph Maraj.

“The dis­tance be­tween Port-of-Spain and Wash­ing­ton has grown,” Maraj said dur­ing a tele­phone in­ter­view on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew yes­ter­day.

The US Pres­i­dent met with the lead­ers of Ja­maica, St Lu­cia, Haiti, Do­mi­ni­can Re­pub­lic and the Ba­hamas yes­ter­day.

But Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, in dis­miss­ing T&T’s non-in­vi­ta­tion to the event at the post-Cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing on Thurs­day, said all of these coun­tries share the same ob­jec­tive of the Li­ma Group—regime change in Venezuela. As such, Row­ley said T&T can stand tall and proud that it has stood by the Unit­ed Na­tions Char­ter prin­ci­ple of non-in­ter­ven­tion with re­gard to the sit­u­a­tion in Venezuela.

But Maraj does not share the Prime Min­is­ter’s out­look.

“We do not stand tall, con­trary to what Dr Row­ley has stat­ed, we stand di­min­ished in the re­gion, we have lost our lead­er­ship of Cari­com which we had. Ja­maica now is lead­ing the way,” said Maraj, who felt the Gov­ern­ment should have ar­tic­u­lat­ed a greater con­cern about the Venezue­lan sit­u­a­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en the fact that the South Amer­i­can coun­try is our ge­o­graph­i­cal neigh­bour.

The for­mer gov­ern­ment min­is­ter al­so felt it was clear that US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump had tak­en note of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s non-in­ter­ven­tion stance in mak­ing his de­ci­sion to ex­clude this coun­try from the meet­ing.

“We’ve re­al­ly ab­di­cat­ed the lead­er­ship in Cari­com and we have ob­vi­ous­ly of­fend­ed the Unit­ed States, and while we have sov­er­eign right to deal with our for­eign re­la­tions we stand by the prin­ci­ples and so, we must al­so pro­tect our re­la­tion­ships,” said Maraj, adding he felt the Prime Min­is­ter’s pub­lic state­ments on the mat­ter al­so did not help the re­la­tion­ship with the US.

He said our re­la­tion­ship with the Unit­ed States was al­ready strained, giv­en that we are no longer seen as an in­vest­ment lo­ca­tion for them.

“The Unit­ed States does not need to in­vest in our petro­chem­i­cal in­dus­try any­more. They have the most gas, nat­ur­al gas in the world,” Maraj said.

"They don’t need our gas, they don’t need our oil. They are a net ex­porter now of both oil and gas. We have lost our eco­nom­ic clout.”

He said, how­ev­er, that giv­en the Unit­ed States’ sta­tus as a ma­jor trade part­ner to our coun­try, the Gov­ern­ment should at­tempt to re­pair its rap­port with the Unit­ed States.