How to Kill a Dragon: Late Petro-State Politics in Trinidad, the US, and Venezuela
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As Trinidad and Tobago prepared for national elections in April 2025, politicians, economists, and analysts eyed the fate of a dragon that slept just off the country’s shores, in Venezuelan waters. The future of the massive gas field, known as “Dragon Gas,” had recently been dealt a heavy blow. As collaboration between Trinidad’s National Gas Company and Venezuela’s national oil company (PDVSA) had only been made possible due to Biden-era sanctions waivers for the latter, the election of Donald Trump cast doubt on the viability of the project.
The Trinbagonian government had made Dragon Gas the center of its promises to revitalize the country’s declining oil and gas industry and end the nation’s economic malaise. However, the Trump administration’s vow in late February to cancel all Biden-era sanctions waivers for Venezuelan fossil fuel projects made the government’s promises of future prosperity increasingly dubious. As Dragon Gas was effectively declared dead in the weeks leading up to the Trinbagonian elections, so too were the governing party’s chances at re-election. They were swept out of power in a landslide opposition victory.
A deeper look at this moment of intense contestation over subsoil extraction between petro-states can help shed new light on some crucial, less-understood aspects of fossil politics in an era of climate crisis. The fate of Dragon Gas reveals how economic sanctions, conventionally understood as targeted measures, actually cause powerful regional effects on unsanctioned countries. The death of Dragon Gas also foregrounds the severe limits of global south countries’ control over resources they ostensibly own, affecting their pursuit of alternatives to extractivism. The consequences of this failed project reveal one last thing: the political fall-out of fossil-fuel dependence gone awry, a type of “late petro-state politics” that calls into question our understanding of the United States itself.
The Latest Developments in the Oldest Petro-State
Trinidad is arguably the world’s oldest petro-economy. It was home to a well by 1857, two years before the drilling of the Pennsylvania well that is often treated as the birth of the modern oil industry. By World War I, the British colony of Trinidad was a primary supplier of oil to the British Empire, the world’s largest consumer of petroleum at the time.
Oil extraction in Trinidad began under colonial conditions. While Trinidad gained independence in 1962 and partially nationalized the oil industry during the 1970s, in practice the country does not entirely control the exploitation of its subsoil resources today. As the saga of Dragon Gas reveals, the country remains bound to the vagaries of the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil and gas, the United States.
The Dragon Gas Field, which would only require a short pipeline to pump gas into Trinidad’s robust natural gas-processing infrastructure due to its proximity, is an unprecedented project. It would enable Venezuela, for the very first time, to export its natural gas, which unlike oil, has to be processed to become a monetized commodity. It would also bolster Trinidad’s natural gas exports at a critical juncture. While it is among the world’s largest exporters of ammonia and liquefied natural gas (LNG), the country’s processing plants have been operating below capacity over the past decade, due in part to the United States’ commitment to fracking, which has converted the U.S. to a globally-dominant producer of natural gas. Though the project would radically restructure the power dynamics between the region’s oil producers, its fate has been ensnared in a web of sanctions: the project requires a permit from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)—the international punitive wing of the US Treasury.
Rather than seriously exploring alternatives to tenuous petro-development, the outgoing government had been focused on wooing the United States to secure sanctions waivers. Though the opposition party (UNC) has accepted the demise of the Dragon Gas project, they remain firmly committed to extractivism, promising to obtain natural gas from Guyana. Yet, as Guyanese officials have made clear to Trinidad’s new government, they also do not effectively control the fate of their natural gas. Guyanese officials have stressed that the decision regarding a potential gas pipeline to Trinidad is ultimately in the hands of US corporation Exxon-Mobil, which has expressed resistance to such a project, given that the much longer pipeline would still have to pass through Venezuelan waters.
The Trinidadian government has proceeded as if they can control the gas-flows into Trinidad by finding an unsanctioned supplier. Nevertheless, US sanctions, though framed as targeted punitive measures, produce wide-ranging regional effects. Even more to the point, however, the final decision on resource extraction often lies not with the governments of Caribbean countries that ostensibly “own” these resources, but with the private corporations that fund and execute their extraction.
A Petro-State Crisis Foretold
Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil famously asserted that the petro-state performs the “magic” of turning hydrocarbons into money, which is supposed to be spectacularly redistributed to the population. Ultimately, as Coronil himself was aware, this is not exactly the case.
Over a hundred years ago, private capital structured oil industries in Trinidad and Venezuela to reproduce dependency on export of a raw material. In Venezuela, Dutch and US companies offshored refining capacity to Curaçao and Aruba in the early 20th century to ensure a separation between the labor of refinement and sites of extraction. Like Trinidad, Venezuela formed a national oil company during the oil boom of the 1970s, but it continued to be dependent on crude export and foreign capital. In addition, even at its peak, only a small percentage of the population was employed the oil and gas industries in Trinidad and Venezuela, though an upper-middle-class minority did benefit from professional employment.
The 2002-2003 Oil Strike of the early Chávez years further exacerbated Venezuela’s reliance on a very crude (pun intended) form of extractivism, leading to the flight of the upper-middle-class professionals who had provided the industry’s technical expertise. The fact that the country with the world’s largest reserves of oil experiences gasoline shortages and has to import refined oil has many causes, including current government mismanagement and US sanctions. Many of the roots of the current crisis, however, predate the Bolivarian revolution by decades.
Trinidad does not face an economic crisis of Venezuela’s magnitude. Nor is it as dependent on crude oil export: windfall profits from the Oil Boom were used to construct value-added processing infrastructure for natural gas. Even still, Trinidad’s declining production and economic downturn are conditioned by its geopolitical context. Trinidad sits next to Venezuela and Guyana, the former a heavily sanctioned petro-state and the latter a new petro-state that charges extremely low royalties on foreign companies. Meanwhile, the rise of the United States to the position of the world’s largest producer of oil and gas since 2014 has weakened the bargaining power of established petro-states in the Global South and diminished U.S. reliance on imported oil and gas.
The Rise of “Late Petro-State Politics”
“Petro-states” are often defined as countries whose economies are highly dependent on the extraction or export of oil. The term usually carries the connotation of governmental “corruption” that allegedly accompanies the “resource curse” of petroleum. As such, the label is often only applied to states in the Global South, thus reproducing a (neo)colonial discourse that sees non-Western states as deviating from liberal democratic models of good governance.
The United States has historically been exempted from the label, both because it has touted itself as a liberal democratic Western nation and because its consumption of oil from around 1950 to 2011 outstripped domestic production. This has obscured the longer role of U.S. companies in profiting off of foreign fossil fuels, as well as the role of U.S. consumer demand in sustaining systems of extractivism. Over the last decade, however, the United States has been the world’s largest domestic consumer and producer of oil and gas by large margins. If the petro-state, as scholar Michael Watts has suggested, is defined by “addiction” to oil, then the United States is a petro-state that is now doubly addicted.
Framing the United States as a “petro-state” casts the country’s current political crisis within a shared regional context of climate crisis. Old petro-states in the region are experiencing what I call “late petro-state politics.” As the ability to turn fossil fuels into money faces a present of climate crisis, but petro-states remain addicted to oil and gas, politics themselves become fossilized. In this temporality, the United States, buffered by its capital and imperial power, is living in what should be a distant past of “drill, baby, drill.” Venezuela, facing an accelerated crisis, is living in the future of declining production and economic downturn. To very different degrees, an increasingly authoritarian populism replaces redistributive petro-populism as the basis of the social contract in these countries, even as these countries currently face very different fortunes.
This is the case in Venezuela today, where the vast social welfare infrastructure of the Chávez years has rapidly collapsed since 2014, not coincidentally the year that the United States cemented its global dominance in oil and gas production. Authoritarian politics and transactional loyalties hold an eviscerated social contact tenuously in place. For politicians, nationalism beckons as a distraction for a disgruntled populace, as the country’s recently-intensified border dispute with Guyana makes clear.
While avoiding political crises as intense as those of its neighbor, since 2014, politics in Trinidad has increasingly depended on promises of spectacular fossil fuel wealth to sugar-coat the reality of a declining petro-economy. The former government simultaneously preached contradictory discourses of austerity and impending prosperity linked to Dragon Gas. After the project’s demise, nationalist populism beckoned. Kamla Persad-Bissessar, who was elected as Prime Minister in 2025 by promising renewed working-class prosperity, has blamed Trinidad’s economic and security crises on Venezuelan migrants and praised Trump’s policies.
While the United States has faced no comparable economic crisis, its current political leaders hype bellicose nationalism and anti-immigrant border security while making empty promises of imminent prosperity and greatness. In Trump’s 2025 inauguration speech, the president promised to “drill, baby, drill,” rooting this mirage of greatness in the “liquid gold beneath our feet” that would make the US “a rich nation again.” After bombing Iran, Trump’s only immediate solution to political and military quagmire was to repeat his command to “DRILL, BABY, DRILL,” this time in capital letters. Yet, this assertion of unparalleled petro-prosperity and extraction was late: the US is already the largest global producer of oil and gas. More importantly, this rise to petro-dominance has coincided with the unprecedented acceleration of a climate crisis that demands transition away from fossil fuels.
As the United States continues contributing to global climate crisis at accelerating levels, one can hardly expect Global South petro-states facing dire economic situations to abandon oil and gas extraction. However, petro-states the world over must now enact a profound transformation away from fossil fuel economies in an accelerating climate crisis. In the meantime, the fossilization of politics will only grow more acute.
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