Stuck in the middle with Young

Austin Fido

THE DATE is set. On March 16, Dr Keith Rowley will step aside, clearing the way for Stuart Young to become the first TT Prime Minister to reach the office by winning a popularity contest at a Tobago picnic.

It’s safe to assume Young would like to remain PM for longer than it takes to enjoy lunch at Store Bay, so his priority on assuming office will be to win the next general election (for which he will first have to set the date). A close second on the to-do list will be steering the ship of government in what he believes to be the right direction for TT. And if we know anything about Stuart Young, we know he’ll be pointing the ship at Venezuela.

As TT’s Energy (and perhaps most energetic) Minister, Young secured some big agreements with our southern neighbour. The Dragon deal landed at the end of 2023, followed by the Cocuina-Manakin deal in mid-2024 – both cross-border arrangements that give TT a role in developing Venezuelan natural gas resources. And we’re told there’s more to come.

Young said earlier this year that all this TT-Venezuela business is forecast to bring around US$10 billion to the national hydrocarbons sector by 2027, and that’s just the beginning of commercial activity slated to last for decades. That kind of work wins you more than a few friends, and might just win a general election as well.

The truly commendable part of all this is navigating TT’s economic interests between the rock and the hard place of the Venezuela and US governments. The prevailing attitude between the two is largely one of seething hostility, hardly a friendly environment for commerce. But the Biden administration opted to use more carrot than stick in its dealings with Venezuela.

In Caracas, President Nicolas Maduro seemed inclined to play nice. With the sun suddenly shining bright on the hydrocarbon-rich space between TT and Venezuela, Minister Young stepped in to make some hay.

Unfortunately, Maduro stopped playing nice almost as quickly as he started. Last year, he brazenly rigged the Venezuela presidential election, challenged Elon Musk to a cage fight, and declared Christmas in October. There’s a US$25 million bounty on Maduro’s head, laid there by an American government that would like to prosecute him on drug trafficking and terrorism charges. Chile is pretty confident his administration commissioned the murder of a Venezuelan dissident in Santiago. And there have been shots fired across the Guyana-Venezuela border.

Personally, I wouldn’t ask Nicolas Maduro to hold $10 for me, let alone $10 billion, but TT doesn’t get to choose its neighbours.

Speaking of neighbours, you may have heard around 70 million of them decided to give Donald Trump another go at running the US.

So far, Trump has celebrated his return to the Oval Office by trying to rename the Gulf of Mexico, threatening Greenland and Panama with invasion, gleefully extorting Ukraine for mineral rights, and promoting insane social media fantasies about turning Gaza into one of his resort properties.

Worse yet, the Trump administration’s specific actions regarding Venezuela are troubling for TT’s interests.

In January, US special envoy Richard Grenell went to Caracas, returning with liberated American prisoners and the strong sense that Trump and Maduro might be inclined to get along. Indeed, Grenell said the US wasn’t interested in regime change, and the two governments agreed they’d like undocumented Venezuelan migrants in America to return home.

Rapprochement between the US and Venezuela is good for TT, as lavishly demonstrated by the gas-deal billions Minister Young was able to rack up over the last couple of years. Unfortunately, it’s not a big hit with Donald Trump’s political base.

Shaken by the backlash to his envoy’s Caracas excursion, Trump announced last week that the Biden-era licence for Chevron to export Venezuelan oil was cancelled. This news landed just a couple of days after Reuters reported TT is applying to renew the permissions it received from the US for the Dragon gas deal.

By the time you read this column, we may know whether the Dragon has been slayed by Trump. What we won’t know, given the hot-and-cold nature of US-Venezuela relations over merely the last month, is how long any policy will last.

All Stuart Young’s hard-won gas deals are now bargaining chips in an ongoing tussle between two of the region’s least stable and most self-interested leaders. For the next TT Prime Minister, what lies ahead is no picnic.