Aligning itself with Washington and dismissing regional diplomacy has left the dual island nation isolated amid the Venezuela crisis
T
here is a saying in Trinidad and Tobago: “Cockroach should stay out of fowl business.” It captures a hard truth. Small states that stray into great-power conflicts rarely emerge unscathed. They are not players; they are expendables.
It’s a statement that frames the reality of where Trinidad and Tobago sits uneasily today.
For small states, geopolitics is not a theatre for bravado but a discipline of diplomacy, restraint and survival. That discipline has now collapsed. Trinidad and Tobago will pay the price of auctioning off its sovereignty to its neocolonial master, the US. The nation now sits dangerously exposed, economically, diplomatically, and potentially militarily, after the US attack on Venezuela and the extraordinary kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro.
