As Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young and three of his Cari­com coun­ter­parts pre­pare to meet with US Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio in Ja­maica to­day, one thing al­ready seems pel­lu­cid­ly clear: The US does not see a role for Venezuela in the fu­ture en­er­gy sta­bil­i­ty of this re­gion.

If, per­chance, this po­si­tion was still not ob­vi­ous based on the ven­omous, an­ti-Nico­las Maduro mouthings of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and Mr Ru­bio him­self over the past two months, then the point was cer­tain­ly brought home yes­ter­day by the US State De­part­ment’s Spe­cial En­voy for Latin Amer­i­ca, Mauri­cio Claver-Caron.

In a brief­ing from Wash­ing­ton ahead of to­day’s Kingston meet­ing, al­so in­volv­ing the lead­ers of Ja­maica, Bar­ba­dos and Haiti, Claver-Caron as­sured the US is deeply com­mit­ted to work­ing with Cari­com, and in par­tic­u­lar T&T, to help it re­vi­talise its all-im­por­tant en­er­gy sec­tor.

How­ev­er, in a very de­tailed brief out­lin­ing key po­si­tions to be tak­en by the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion in the talks with Cari­com lead­ers, it was in­struc­tive that ab­solute­ly no men­tion was made of the T&T/Venezuela Drag­on gas deal.

Claver-Caron spent a lot of time ar­tic­u­lat­ing the US po­si­tion on Venezuela, whose “trou­bling” en­er­gy his­to­ry with the Caribbean he strong­ly de­nounced, as he made clear the mes­sage Ru­bio in­tends to com­mu­ni­cate to re­gion­al lead­ers to­day.

The US gov­ern­ment of­fi­cial fur­ther crit­i­cised the Petro­Caribe agree­ment be­tween Venezuela and Cari­com na­tions as one of “en­dem­ic cor­rup­tion” and re­gion­al “ex­tor­tion,” while propos­ing that Guyana, Suri­name and T&T, with US as­sis­tance, could be­come the new en­er­gy providers for the Caribbean.

What Claver-Caron ap­peared to be telling us, with­out do­ing so di­rect­ly, is that T&T is un­like­ly to get any fur­ther US sup­port for the Drag­on gas arrange­ment be­cause of Venezuela’s in­volve­ment in it.

This would leave T&T in a very vul­ner­a­ble po­si­tion eco­nom­i­cal­ly, even though the US seems de­ter­mined to work with Trinidad to “re-en­er­gise” its econ­o­my and to en­sure that it “con­tin­ues to move for­ward.”

For­mer prime min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, in an­nounc­ing the ex­ten­sion of T&T’s li­cence to work with Shell on ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion, had not­ed in De­cem­ber 2023 that the Drag­on field was not on­ly to give T&T more ac­cess to gas but would have ben­e­fit­ed the peo­ple of Venezuela in giv­ing them ac­cess to the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket and ben­e­fits from the earn­ings of the op­er­a­tion.

This is ex­act­ly what the new Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion is seek­ing to crush, a stance re­in­forced this week with the im­po­si­tion of a 25 per cent tar­iff on any coun­try that pur­chas­es oil and gas from Cara­cas.

With the writ­ing now on the wall, we are not yet clear what Ru­bio in­tends to pro­pose as a demon­stra­tion of his ad­min­is­tra­tion’s “deep com­mit­ment” to T&T’s gas fu­ture.

Out­side of the Drag­on field, T&T’s op­tions for fu­ture gas de­vel­op­ment re­main very lim­it­ed and un­less the US pro­vides an op­tion that would pro­vide a re­li­able sup­ply, it is dif­fi­cult to un­der­stand where we can go from here with gas pro­duc­tion.

Prime Min­is­ter Young’s lead­er­ship in this re­gard is there­fore crit­i­cal.

Hav­ing led the dis­cus­sions on T&T’s en­er­gy fu­ture for the last four years af­ter suc­ceed­ing the late en­er­gy min­is­ter Franklin Khan, he now needs to put all of his ex­per­tise and en­er­gy to work to push Sec­re­tary Ru­bio for the best pos­si­ble out­come for T&T.

With the coun­try’s eco­nom­ic fu­ture now rest­ing heav­i­ly up­on his shoul­der, how he man­ages this is­sue can po­ten­tial­ly de­ter­mine his po­lit­i­cal fu­ture as well.