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.

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 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.

For small states, the cardinal sin is not choosing the “wrong” side but collapsing strategic ambiguity. That is precisely what Trinidad and Tobago did. Persad-Bissessar boxed her country in. Her public alignment with Washington’s racist dictator in chief, combined with disparaging remarks toward respected Caribbean leaders and a casual dismissal of regional diplomacy and historic ties, has left Trinidad and Tobago isolated at precisely the moment when geopolitical flexibility was necessary.

During her earlier term, memorably declaring that Trinidad and Tobago was “not the ATM of the........

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