Dear Editor,
The Trump administration has just formulated and published a new “U.S. National Security Strategy” (US NSS) that tweaks the realist school of foreign policy’s focus on its statist sovereign-first, interest-first survival, and self-help into “Flexible Realism”. “US policy…will seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”
It explains the actions of the US since it took office and very critically for us in Guyana and its pivot away from the rest of the world to refocus on the Western Hemisphere as their number 1 priority. The NSS explicitly establishes the latter by declaring that it “wants a hemisphere that remains free from hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports key supply chains; and we want to ensure access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.” Militarily, this means “a readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere, and away from theaters whose relative import to American national security has declined in recent decades or years.”
For Guyana, because of the first law of geography – “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things” – clearly we will be impacted by the US unapologetic revival of the Monroe Doctrine, shorn of its old idealistic rhetoric of democracy and institution building. Its actions against Venezuela, for instance, has now been articulated as directed against narco-trafficking to the US, which all concede is not as large as from Columbia or Ecuador. The NSS now stated objective to “deny non-Hemispheric competitors control over strategic assets” more realistically explains the actions in view of Venezuela having the largest oil reserves in the world. This clause would also affect how the U.S. views investment or partnerships in Guyana from non-American – especially Chinese – sources when it comes to ports, infrastructure, offshore assets, natural-resource projects such as in oil, gold or manganese. China, which was previously defined as the primary miliary threat to the US, in the new dispensation the former is now more of an economic competitor; a source of supply chain vulnerabilities and a player whose regional dominance should be “ideally” denied because it “has major implications for the U.S. economy.”
In the near and medium term, the US will clearly view us as a relevant partner in its hemisphere posture in general and vis a vis Venezuela, in particular; especially for maritime surveillance, operations, or as a strategic gateway. Indeed, outside analysts and observers have pointed out that U.S. strategy could make Guyana a more integrated node in their hemispheric security architecture. This writer has proposed we establish a military base in Essequibo to which the US can have access since fortuitously, because of Venezuela’s demonstrated insistence to annex two-thirds of our national territory (Essequibo), our interests at this time, coincide. But once there is regime change in Venezuela to satisfy US interests, our interests may diverge since annexation is a constant in Venezuela’s strategic culture and the US has now explicitly jettisoned idealistic notions like democratic compatibility from its foreign policy. However, for the next thirty years, Exxon’s exploitation of our Stabroek Block should be a deterrence to new Venezuelan adventurism, rather than any ICJ judgement which will be more moral than anything else.
The NSS explicitly declares that the U.S. will “enlist established friends” in the Hemisphere to handle shared regional challenges — for example: controlling migration, stopping narcotics or drug flows, suppressing organized crime/cartels, and improving security across border. The US describes us as a strategic ally so we should see increased U.S. engagement based on their expectations on security cooperation, intelligence and maritime collaboration along. We, however, should press for economic incentives or investments such as the Gas-to-Shore industrialization hub as quid pro quos. The limits on “external influence” will be tricky since we already have diverse investment partners – read China – that will create diplomatic, economic, and sovereignty-management challenges.
The US aggressive posture toward drug trafficking and cartel/”narco-terrorist” networks — including the use of lethal force has raised legal, human-rights and regional-sovereignty concerns and some claim have violated international norms. Trinidad has fervently supported the moves based on their own experience and interests and we will have to also take a stand.