Trinidad’s Economic Exposure to US Seen as Factor in CARICOM Tensions

(Barbados Nation) The tension between Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and some of her counterparts in CARICOM, rooted in the Venezuela-United States (US) conflict, has unearthed unresolved tensions within the region.

That is the view of Professor Troy Lorde, who said, “Any honest analysis must also confront the elephant in the room: Trinidad and Tobago’s economic exposure to the United States.”

Persad-Bissessar’s remarks drew swift response from Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda Gaston Browne and criticism from Dr Keith Rowley, Persad-Bissessar’s predecessor.

“The US is a dominant destination for Trinidad’s energy exports and petrochemical products. Access to US markets, US dollar clearing, and US regulatory goodwill is not optional. It is existential,” Lorde said.

He said that when Persad-Bissessar declared that CARICOM was “not a reliable partner at this time”, it sounded to some like the opening shot of a fracture in the region’s most durable post-independence institution. On the other hand, others dismissed it as campaign rhetoric dressed up as foreign policy realism.

“Both readings miss the deeper point. This is not, at heart, a dispute about Venezuela. It is about the limits of Caribbean regionalism under geopolitical pressure and what happens when a regional organisation built on consensus, sovereignty and diplomatic restraint collides with the hard realities of security dependence, energy markets and domestic political survival,” he said.

The Dean of the Faculty of Social Science at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus said Trinidad and Tobago occupied a unique geographical position in relation to Venezuela, and structurally embedded in US energy markets and security architectures in a way most CARICOM states are not.

“When Trinidad approves for US military aircraft to transit its airspace – however carefully framed as logistical or non-hostile – it inevitably triggers regional anxieties. Not because other CARICOM states believe Trinidad is conspiring in regime change, but because precedent matters in small-state diplomacy. Once one state is perceived as facilitating “great power” projection, others worry about where the line will be drawn next,” he said.

Against this background, Persad-Bissessar’s criticism was not merely that CARICOM disagreed with Trinidad’s posture, but that the organisation had lost coherence, discipline and reliability,” Lorde reasoned.

“That is a much more serious charge, because it attacks institutional legitimacy, not just policy substance. Is this a real fracture? The short answer is no, but it is a stress fracture and stress fractures become breaks if pressure is repeated often enough,” he said.

Lorde reasoned that CARICOM often behaved as though all member states faced equivalent constraints when they did not, since energy dependence, market concentration, and security exposure widely varied. When CARICOM adopted positions that appeared morally coherent but strategically detached, states like Trinidad experienced this as indifference rather than solidarity.

“Persad-Bissessar’s intervention, read this way, is less a rejection of CARICOM than a warning: regional unity cannot be sustained if it ignores differentiated vulnerability. The real danger is not that Trinidad will abandon CARICOM. It is that CARICOM will drift into performative consensus – issuing statements that satisfy ideological instincts but fail to account for the lived constraints of its members.

“If that happens, more leaders will do what Persad-Bissessar has done: bypass the organisation rhetorically while remaining inside it institutionally. Over time, that hollowing out is far more damaging than any formal exit.

Political analyst Devaron Bruce believes it is time for the chairman of CARICOM, Prime Minister of Jamaica Andrew Holness, to step in and initiate a dialogue rather than the parties engaging in public fighting.

“I know he is certainly caught up with his circumstances, given the hurricane situation, but as chairman, I really think that he has to take a stance regarding how the perception of CARICOM is possibly being hurt due to the infighting publicly,” he said.

The issues of the 52-year-old CARICOM are known, but to have the leaders criticising each other was a step in the wrong direction, Bruce said.

“I believe that he would have to put together an emergency session amongst them and really discuss how we move forward in a more uniform and conciliatory, and less divisive fashion,” said Bruce, who suggested the start of the year for the meeting.

He said the entire set of circumstances was unfortunate, considering that CARICOM has been working in many people’s favour for generations.

He regarded Persad-Bissessar as a lone wolf in her strong criticisms of CARICOM but noted they were not new, as he recalled her Trinidad was not the ATM for CARICOM remarks from 2010 when a hurricane affected the region.