Tues­day's an­nounce­ment by Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young that the US ad­min­is­tra­tion has de­cid­ed to re­voke the ex­emp­tions from the US sanc­tions that al­lowed the ini­tial de­vel­op­ment of Venezuela's Drag­on field and the cross-bor­der Cocuina-Man­akin fields would not have come as a sur­prise to any­one.

That is be­cause from the ear­ly days of his pres­i­den­cy, which is still less than three months, Mr Trump sig­nalled his in­ten­tion to starve the Venezue­lan ad­min­is­tra­tion of Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro of en­er­gy rev­enues, tak­ing ac­tion to halt the op­er­a­tions of the French oil firm Mau­rel & Prom, the Span­ish en­er­gy com­pa­ny Rep­sol, Italy's Eni and Amer­i­can en­er­gy gi­ant Chevron.

It was al­most in­evitable that sim­i­lar ac­tion would have been tak­en against T&T and its part­ners Shell for the Drag­on de­vel­op­ment, and BP, which is look­ing to un­der­take the ex­plo­ration of the Cocuina-Man­akin field.

Prime Min­is­ter Young has in­di­cat­ed that he will use all the levers avail­able to him to con­vince the US gov­ern­ment to change its mind on the two li­cences. That is a rea­son­able ap­proach, giv­en the capri­cious na­ture of Mr Trump's lead­er­ship, which was demon­strat­ed yes­ter­day by his de­ci­sion to grant a 90-day pause on the im­ple­men­ta­tion of rec­i­p­ro­cal tar­iffs on all coun­tries ex­cept Chi­na.

The can­cel­la­tion of the two li­cences is a sig­nif­i­cant blow to the econ­o­my of T&T, as the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion was bank­ing on the nat­ur­al gas from the two fields to but­tress the nat­ur­al de­cline of gas fields in T&T wa­ters.

With­out the nat­ur­al gas from the Drag­on and Cocuina-Man­akin fields, it is clear that T&T's fu­ture eco­nom­ic prospects be­yond 2027, when the first gas from Drag­on was ex­pect­ed, have be­come murki­er and that the pop­u­la­tion may be called up­on af­ter this month's gen­er­al elec­tions to tight­en its col­lec­tive belts.

Both of T&T's ma­jor po­lit­i­cal par­ties need to face up to this pos­si­bil­i­ty and ad­dress it in the mes­sages they send to the elec­torate dur­ing this pe­ri­od of height­ened po­lit­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ty.

Com­ing out of his meet­ing with US Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio in Kingston, Ja­maica, on March 26, Prime Min­is­ter Young said he had re­ceived an as­sur­ance that the US would "do no harm" to the T&T econ­o­my in its en­gage­ment with Venezuela. He com­mu­ni­cat­ed this to T&T at his post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence the day af­ter.

Since it is clear that the re­vo­ca­tion of the two li­cences is like­ly to do T&T con­sid­er­able harm, in the in­ter­est of trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty, Mr Young must clar­i­fy the cir­cum­stances in which the state­ment was made by Ru­bio. While the is­sue of trust aris­es, it may be that the de­ci­sion was tak­en else­where in the US ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Giv­en the im­por­tance of nat­ur­al gas to the T&T econ­o­my, and the po­ten­tial role that Venezuela plays in sell­ing nat­ur­al gas to this coun­try, the is­sue of the re­vo­ca­tion of the nat­ur­al gas li­cences not on­ly re­quires in­tro­spec­tion by the Gov­ern­ment, but al­so the dogged pur­suit of the best na­tion­al and re­gion­al in­ter­est.

In ad­dress­ing the is­sue of the re­cent im­po­si­tion of tar­iffs by the US on coun­tries around the world, cur­rent Cari­com chair Bar­ba­dos Prime Min­is­ter Mia Mot­t­ley put it well when she spoke about "the strength and in­no­va­tion of our com­mon Caribbean spir­it," and the need to sup­port and up­lift each oth­er "will see this through.”