By J. Brent Crosson<\/a>, Associate Professor, UT Austin<\/strong> <\/p>\n \u201cDragon Gas\u201d\u2014that was the phrase on the lips of Trinidadian commentators following the 2024 US presidential elections.\u00a0 As Trinidad and Tobago1<\/a><\/sup> prepared for its own national elections in April 2025, politicians, economists, and analysts eyed the fate of a dragon that slept just off the shore of Trinidad, in Venezuelan waters.\u00a0 In 2023 under the conditions of Biden-era sanctions waivers, Venezuela\u2019s national oil company (PDVSA) granted Trinidad\u2019s National Gas Company a 30-year lease (operated by the Shell corporation) to develop a cross-border natural gas development, colloquially dubbed \u201cDragon Gas\u201d in Trinidad.\u00a0 Trinidad\u2019s central government had made Dragon Gas the center of promises<\/a> to revitalize the country\u2019s declining oil and gas industry, delivering prosperity that would allegedly end the nation\u2019s current economic malaise.\u00a0 However, as newly reelected US President Trump and his appointed US Secretary of State Marco Rubio vowed in late February 2025 to cancel all Biden-era sanctions-waivers for oil and gas development with Venezuela<\/a>, the dragon dance of future prosperity seemed like an increasingly dubious prospect.\u00a0<\/p>\n The much-anticipated \u201cDragon Gas\u201d derives its name from a submarine natural gas field off the coast of Venezuela\u2019s Paria Peninsula: The Dragon Field, known as El Campo Drag\u00f3n in Venezuela.\u00a0 Since only a few miles of ocean separate the tip of the Paria Peninsula from the shores of Trinidad, the Dragon Field buts up against Trinidad\u2019s maritime borders, and only a relatively short pipeline would be necessary to pump Dragon Gas into Trinidad\u2019s robust natural gas-processing infrastructure.\u00a0 If it ever happens, the Dragon project would represent the first time that Venezuela would be able to export its natural gas (because gas, unlike oil, has to be processed to become a monetized commodity).\u00a0 Though Trinidad and Venezuela are separated by only a few miles of sea, Venezuela exports no natural gas or derivatives, while Trinidad is the world\u2019s largest exporter of the natural gas-derivative ammonia<\/a> and one of the largest exporters of liquified natural gas<\/a> (LNG).\u00a0 However, over the past decade, Trinidad\u2019s natural gas processing plants have been operating below capacity<\/a>, with their share of global LNG exports steadily shrinking (and the United States\u2019 share of LNG exports skyrocketing thanks to \u201cfracking\u201d).\u00a0 Dragon Gas would radically change these situations, making Venezuela into an exporter of natural gas and restoring growth in Trinidad\u2019s largely natural gas-based economy.\u00a0 But this \u201cdragon dance\u201d needs a party permit to happen, specifically a permit from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)\u2014the international punitive wing of the US Treasury.\u00a0<\/p>\n When thinking about postcolonial futures from the perspective of Trinidad, it is hard not to pay attention to submarine dragons with transnational tails.\u00a0 These tails point not toward a future of renewable energy, but toward a somewhat desperate bid by one of the world\u2019s oldest petro-states to regain prominence in an oil and gas market heavily dominated by the US.\u00a0 Since United States\u2019 widespread implementation of fracking, a particularly resource-intensive method of mining fossil fuels, the US has become the world\u2019s largest producer of oil and gas by large margins since 2014 (while maintaining its long-standing position as the largest consumer of these hydrocarbons).\u00a0 Though experiencing declining production during this same period, Trinidad is arguably the world\u2019s oldest petro-economy, with a commercial well drilled there in 1857, two years before the Drake Well in Pennsylvania that is usually taken as the starting point for the modern oil industry (see, for example, Wilson et al. 2017: 5).\u00a0 By World War I, the British colony of Trinidad was the primary supplier of oil to the world\u2019s largest consumer of petroleum\u2014the British Empire, which was the first global power to convert its navy from coal to oil.\u00a0 Oil extraction in Trinidad began under colonial conditions in which the people of Trinidad did not control the resources beneath their feet.\u00a0 While Trinidad gained independence in 1962 and the oil industry became partially nationalized during the Oil Boom of the 1970s, in practice Trinidad does not control the exploitation of its subsoil resources or its access to supplies of natural gas today.\u00a0 Amidst his unilateral threats directed at the Caribbean region2<\/a><\/sup>, Trump promised spectacular domestic prosperity by urging the US to \u201cdrill, baby, drill\u201d in his 2025 inauguration speech<\/a>, appointing a fracking-magnate as Secretary of Energy<\/a>.\u00a0 The repercussion of Trump\u2019s early 2025 policies in the Caribbean showed that the Trinidadian government\u2019s own promises of future prosperity remained bound to the vagaries of the world\u2019s largest producer and consumer of oil and gas.\u00a0 The 2024 US elections, therefore, left Trinidadians wondering whether the touted Dragon would be able to dance.<\/p>\n The \u201cdragon dance\u201d between the petro-states of Trinidad, Venezuela, and the US demonstrates several dynamics: first, the powerful regional effects that US sanctions can exert on unsanctioned countries; second, the limits of Latin American and Caribbean states\u2019 ownership of subsoil resources; and third, the transformation of power that is taking place in what I, following Anna Palmer<\/a>, term \u201clate petro-states.\u201d\u00a0 I take the term \u201cdragon dance\u201d from the most iconic post-Black Power novel in Trinidad\u2014The Dragon Can\u2019t Dance <\/em>(1979) by Earl Lovelace.\u00a0 The novel revolves around the carnival dragon masquerade of its central character Aldrick, who painstakingly hand-sews his dragon costume each year in preparation for the island\u2019s famed carnival.\u00a0 While Aldrick makes the costume with his own hands and becomes a fearsome dragon by donning the suit, he realizes that he does not own the dragon costume (since the figure of the dragon is the collective, rather than individual, property of Trinidad\u2019s mass celebration of Carnival).\u00a0 Ultimately, Aldrick hangs up his dragon suit as carnival becomes increasingly commodified and controlled by corporate sponsorship.\u00a0 Rather than letting corporations appropriate a dragon he does not own, he refuses to let the dragon circulate.\u00a0 Instead of dancing the dragon, he participates in an armed rebellion that is ultimately suppressed by the Trinidadian state.<\/p>\n In a resonant (yet different) way, Trinidad has had to realize that it did not really own the Dragon Gas that promised to clothe the country in renewed petro-prosperity.\u00a0 Rather than refusing to let this dragon circulate in a market it could not control, however, the outgoing government attempted to woo Marco Rubio in a bid to make an ailing dragon dance.\u00a0 As the opposition party (UNC) has taken power, they have scuttled the Dragon Gas project in light of US sanctions, promising to obtain natural gas from Guyana (or, possibly, Suriname).\u00a0 Yet, as Guyanese officials made clear to Trinidad in meetings with the new government, they also do not effectively control the fate of the natural gas beneath that country.\u00a0 Vice President of Guyana,\u00a0Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, stated that the decision regarding Guyana\u2019s gas ultimately lay with the US corporation Exxon-Mobil, which was in charge of monetizing the resource.\u00a0 Given that a pipeline from Guyana to Trinidad would be much longer and would still have to pass through Venezuelan waters (a country currently in a long-standing border dispute with Guyana), it seemed dubious as to whether Exxon-Mobil would see such a project as a better investment than simply investing in natural gas processing in Guyana (a country where Exxon-Mobil enjoys incredibly generous concessions).\u00a0 In late April 2025, the Energy Chamber of Trinidad and Tobago themselves admitted that<\/a>: \u201cIn the past Exxon\u2019s\u00a0Country Manager [in Guyana], Alistair Routledge,\u00a0said the distance between Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as the route it must take through Venezuela\u2019s territorial waters, are two major obstacles hindering the construction of a natural gas pipeline to export gas from Guyana to T&T.\u201d<\/p>\n Aldrick\u2019s response to owning, but ultimately not owning, a prized dragon was to hang up the costume.\u00a0 The Trinidadian government\u2019s response to not owning a dragon has been to continue what Ryan Jobson<\/a> (2024) calls \u201cthe petro-state masquerade\u201d of immanent, limitless wealth.\u00a0 Even as the opposition government rejected the outgoing administration\u2019s flagship Dragon Gas project, they simply proceeded as if they could control the gas that flows into Trinidad by finding another partner who was not sanctioned by the US.\u00a0 Sanctions, however, are not simply targeted punitive measures (although the US government tends to portray them as such).\u00a0 Certainly, as critics of sanctions on Venezuela have noted, US sanctions enact collective punishment on the most vulnerable populations of the target country, while the ostensible object of sanctions (government elites) are able to maintain their economic and political power.\u00a0 More than this, Dragon Gas shows that sanctions exert regional consequences that overflow the boundaries of the targeted nation, affecting unsanctioned US allies.\u00a0 Even without sanctions, the final decision on resource extraction often lies not with the governments of Caribbean countries that ostensibly \u201cown\u201d these resources, but with the private corporations that fund and execute their extraction.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n For Aldrick in The Dragon Can\u2019t Dance<\/em> (Lovelace 1979), the dragon\u2019s inability to dance was a choice, a concerted refusal to let the dragon circulate in a market he could not control.\u00a0 For the government of Trinidad (as well as Venezuela or Guyana), however, there is no refusal.\u00a0 They might love to realize Trump\u2019s dictate of \u201cdrill, baby, drill,\u201d but they are largely dependent on foreign (primarily US, European, and Australian) capital or US-dominated geopolitics to realize this \u201cpetro-state masquerade.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil<\/a>, in his foundational 1997 work, asserted that the petro-state performs the \u201cmagic\u201d of turning hydrocarbons into money.\u00a0 Ultimately, however, this is not exactly the case.\u00a0 Over a hundred years ago, private capital structured the oil industries in Trinidad and Venezuela to reproduce dependency on export of a raw material.\u00a0 This was particularly intensive in early twentieth-century Venezuela, where Dutch and US companies intentionally offshored refining capacity to Cura\u00e7ao and Aruba to ensure a separation between the concentrated labor of refinement and sites of extraction.\u00a0 Like Trinidad, Venezuela formed a national oil company during the oil boom of the 1970\u2019s but continued to be dependent on crude export and foreign capital.\u00a0 The anti-Ch\u00e1vez 2002-2003 Oil Strike (paro petrolero) <\/em>of the early Ch\u00e1vez years further exacerbated Venezuela\u2019s reliance on a very crude (pun intended) form of extractivism, also contributing to the subsequent flight of the upper-middle-class Venezuelan professionals who had provided the technical expertise within the country\u2019s oil industry.\u00a0 The fact that Venezuela, while possessing the world\u2019s largest reserves of oil, now experiences gasoline shortages and has to import refined oil has many causes, including current government mismanagement and US sanctions (which make it difficult to import the inputs necessary for refining Venezuela\u2019s heavy crude).\u00a0 Yet, some of the causes of the current crisis predate the Bolivarian revolution by decades.\u00a0<\/p>\n Trinidad does not face an economic crisis of Venezuela\u2019s magnitude and is not as dependent on crude oil export because the country used some of the windfall profits of the Oil Boom to construct value-added processing infrastructure for natural gas.\u00a0 Yet, they also face declining production and an economic downturn conditioned by geopolitical contexts.\u00a0 Trinidad sits next to both a heavily sanctioned petro-state (Venezuela) and a new petro-state that charges extremely low royalties on foreign companies (Guyana).\u00a0 One of its neighbors to the north (the US) has become the world\u2019s largest producer of oil and gas by large margins since 2014, weakening the bargaining power of established global south petro-states and diminishing the United States\u2019 reliance on imported oil and gas.\u00a0 Foreign capital would surely prefer the new offshore frontiers of Guyana, a pliable government that only charges 2 percent royalties on Exxon-Mobil (royalties in Trinidad are typically in the 10-12.5 percent range).\u00a0<\/p>\n In this context, old petro-states in the region are experiencing what I, repurposing Anna Palmer<\/a>\u2019s turn-of-phrase, call \u201clate petro-state\u201d politics.\u00a0 As the ability of the government to enact the redistributive \u201cmagic\u201d of turning fossil fuels into money falters, politics themselves become fossilized.\u00a0 An increasingly conservative or authoritarian populism, which emphasizes strict loyalty to a party or leader, replaces redistributive petro-populism as the basis of the social contract.\u00a0 This is particularly the case in Venezuela today, where the vast social welfare infrastructure of the Ch\u00e1vez years has rapidly collapsed since 2014, with authoritarian politics and transactional loyalties holding an eviscerated social contract tenuously in place.\u00a0 The rise of authoritarian populism is also quite marked in another old petro-state, albeit one that, by virtue of its \u201cfirst-world status\u201d is hardly ever labelled as such:\u00a0 the United States.\u00a0 One of the many differences between these countries, of course, is that Venezuela has faced a very real economic crisis, while the US, located at the center of imperial power, petro-capital, and refining capacities, has faced no comparable crisis.\u00a0 However, the early months of the Trump administration have shown how the rise of a kleptocratic authoritarian populism can itself induce economic uncertainty.\u00a0 There are further qualifications and distinctions necessary in making this comparison3<\/a><\/sup>, but the point remains that authoritarianism and transactional loyalties mark late petro-politics in states that remain heavily dependent on fossil fuels amidst a rapidly accelerating climate crisis and the push for alternative energy sources.\u00a0 As climate crisis demands a reconsideration of these countries\u2019 economic bases, but no viable alternatives to the petro-economy are seriously pursued, politics themselves in late petro-states fossilize.\u00a0 Sandy Smith-Noninni<\/a> has thus incisively noted in this special series that continued prioritization of fossil fuel-based systems in the US has created a rigid climate of \u201cfossilized politics.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n Trinidad has not experienced this magnitude of an authoritarian turn.\u00a0 It is an intensely democratic and plural country with no ethnic, racial, or religious majority.\u00a0 Unlike in Venezuela or the US, Trinidad has had non-white political leadership since independence (even as a very small minority of local whites and near-white \u201cSyrians\u201d exert disproportionate economic power).\u00a0 Unlike in Venezuela or the US, the overwhelming majority of the population in Trinidad are descendants of plantation labor.\u00a0 Still, like Venezuela and the US, the government of Trinidad continues to wager its future on fossil fuel extraction, denying a reality in which the world must drastically decrease fossil fuel extraction to survive.\u00a0 Politics increasingly depend on promises of spectacular wealth to sugar-coat the reality of a declining petro-economy.\u00a0 While Trinidad has not experienced an equivalent surge of authoritarian populism as compared with the petro-states of Venezuela or the United States, the prime minister elected in the 2025 elections has openly expressed admiration for Trump\u2019s \u201canti-woke\u201d agenda,<\/a> reproducing some key Republican agenda items in its platform, including anti-immigrant policing (which in Trinidad largely targets recent Venezuelan migrants), gun rights, stand your ground laws, and spectacular promises of an immanent (yet dubious) return of working class prosperity.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, there is more than enough fossil fuel below the earth to continue the current system for years to come.\u00a0 However, in Trinidad, the ability to extract or explore for these fossil fuels is severely limited by the rise of neighboring competition (the US or Guyana), its vulnerability to the vagaries of US geopolitics, and its long-standing relation of dependence on foreign petro-capital.\u00a0 Dragon Gas made these limitations of the \u201cpetro-state masquerade\u201d of unending prosperity abundantly clear.\u00a0 Rather than simply betting the country\u2019s future on a rather dubious prospect of a gas pipeline from Guyana, future governments will have to find a new basis for the legitimation of political power besides the \u201cmagic\u201d of the petro-state.\u00a0 And like Aldrick, they will eventually have to hang up the dragon costume and attempt to enact alternatives to \u201cthe petro-state masquerade.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/aesengagement.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/f9a51975-835d-497f-aa56-e34ea55047a4.jpg?w=688\")
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