There 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.

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.

With Delcy Rodríguez now installed as Venezuela’s president and Diosdado Cabello still embedded, the Maduro regime remains largely intact. Trinidad and Tobago now faces an openly hostile neighbour whose senior leadership has denounced the dual island state’s prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, as a complicit enabler of US aggression and designated her persona non grata. This is not misfortune. It is the price of strategic misjudgment.

This crisis did not arrive overnight. Through rhetorical excess, Persad-Bissessar has steadily narrowed our country’s room for manoeuvre. What is now unfolding is the predictable outcome of decades of amateurish improvisation masquerading as governance. Successive administrations have failed to articulate a coherent foreign policy for what was once the wealthiest country in the Caribbean.