Dear Editor,
It is timely to examine the impact of U.S. foreign policy on Guyana’s domestic politics, particularly its implications for African and Indian politics, bearing in mind the present international and geopolitical realities. What options, if any, are open to the African community? Are we now in a position similar to that occupied by the PPP and much of the Indian community between 1964 to 1992?
Before Guyana’s independence and thereafter, the U.S. has exerted tremendous influence and pressure to shape political outcomes in the country. At various periods of our politics, the U.S. foreign policy considerations have had to be accommodated, either willingly or sometimes under considerable pressure. During the cold war, U.S. policy was mainly shaped by anti-communism. Today, it is increasingly driven by strategic competition with China, oil security and interests, and the reassertion of American influence in the western hemisphere.
The U.S. foreign policy under the first Trump administration was driven by the mantra “make America strong again,” which significantly refocused U.S. foreign policy goals, making them more self-centered. His present administration has taken a more aggressive, unilateral, and militarised approach to achieving foreign policy objectives. The US/China competition for global hegemony has manifested in the Caribbean and Guyana, with a shift of the U.S. focus from democracy, human rights, and diplomacy to transactional relationships and support for politically aligned governments. Trinidad and Guyana in the so-called English-speaking Caribbean are notable examples. While it faces pushback in its efforts to ride the region of growing Chinese economic investments, it has achieved more success in muting regional governments’ objections to its military actions in its so-called war on narcotics in the Caribbean Sea and in bullying governments to end the Cuban doctors’ historic service to the regional health sector, in which Guyana has been a major beneficiary for decades. And the PPP/C-led government unashamedly capitulated to U.S. pressure and “whitemail.”
Guyana, a petrostate, is important to U.S. strategic interests. The country is in an unprecedented position, given the strategic importance of energy to U.S. national security, and the importance that the country attaches to control/ access to the world’s energy resources. Now, with U.S. control of Venezuelan oil after kidnapping its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, the U.S. has control over the world’s largest known oil reserves, which objectively reduces the importance of Guyana oil in relation to America’s national security and energy needs. Except that Guyana’s low-cost production and sweet grade oil give it special consideration, if not preference, over Venezuelan heavy crude. In short, the U.S. has its hands on both countries’ oil reserves, thereby denying any competitors. Guyana’s domestic politics reflects this reality. There is no significant political force that represents a real challenge to the present US/Western political domination in Guyana, unlike the post-independence period (1966 to 1992), when anti-imperialism and nationalism were major tenets of our nation’s politics in both major parties, the WPA and other leftist groups.
With Venezuela under U.S. control, Washington is now in a situation of divided loyalty, so to speak. While the Trump Administration has since repeated its support for Guyana in the border matter, it is no secret that forces in the U.S. have already been working to change the US’s present position to once more in favour of Venezuela, citing that country’s oil/ gold and other natural resources and a large domestic market for American goods and services, when compared to Guyana. Critics of the U.S. have warned that, given President Trump‘s transactional politics, Guyana is in danger of being forced by the U.S. to reach a “deal” with Venezuela to divide Essequibo between the two countries, despite a favourable ICC ruling on the territorial claim. Ironically, it was the U.S. that urged Venezuela to renew its claim as part of its Cold War considerations, given the likelihood of Dr. Cheddi Jagan and the PPP governing independent Guyana, given that party’s commitment to the then USSR. The consequences of that policy have had a negative influence on Guyana’s economic and political development for decades, with governments conscious of the U.S. role in the equation.
Earlier, I raised the question: what options, if any, are open to the African community? Are we where the Indian community and the PPP were in (1964 to 1992)? In some regards, yes! The PPP today occupies a position similar in some respects to that of the PNC after 1964, that is, benefitting from sustained U.S. support. It has enjoyed and maintained that support largely from 1992 to the present. A key reason has been its shift from its historical allegiance to Marxism/Leninism/Socialism and anti-imperialism to a pragmatic and self-serving alignment with U.S. foreign policy priorities. Having paid a political price for its earlier ideological positions, the PPP has embraced a strategic relationship that places support for Washington at the core of its agenda. The present situation, however, differs fundamentally from the cold war era. Unlike the period when Dr. Cheddi Jagan and the PPP were viewed by Washington as ideological adversaries, there is no comparable ideological challenge to U.S. political, economic, or security interests. In this political environment, where there is little or no ideological contestation, the African community and its political leadership have more space in this equation than the Indian community and its leadership had in the period (1964 to 1992) that was characterised by intense ideological struggle between the political parties and ethnic communities.
My argument is against Africans’ self-inflicted paralysis that sees U.S. foreign policy as the death knell to the African fight for justice and equality/equity in Guyana. Effective politics requires that we pursue our interests, even when doing so clashes with aspects of the U.S. policy.
Now, let us look at the concrete challenges facing the African community. Our 400 years of presence in Guyana have been characterised by enslavement, deprivation of hundreds of years of generational wealth, colonialism, neo-colonialism in the form of Independence, and cultural and spiritual destruction, putting us at a disadvantage in our plural, ethnically divided country with intense political, economic, social, and cultural competition. Even before oil, the African community has been doing badly due to historic damage, structural, and institutional. This was so even when an African-dominated party (PNC) held power for 28 years. Today, after 29 years of the Indian dominated PPP in power the African community faces an existential threat to its survival with oil and the old and new challenges emerging that, if not urgently addressed, will inevitably lead to a new form of enslavement. In this situation, therefore, the African community has legitimate reasons to push back against international actors, including the United States, in pursuit of our struggle against an existential threat. It is not normal politics. Let me illustrate. If the U.S. insists on internal stability to promote investment and economic activity, but the application of that policy contributes to African domination and a new form of enslavement, then that policy does not serve African interests.
With this in mind, we must push back and seek to exploit the elasticity inherent in the application of U.S. foreign policy. This approach takes nothing for granted; we seek true struggle and diplomacy to determine what is possible. Some argued that if the opposition and by extension the African community engaged in aggressive protest actions, the U.S. would take the side of the government, and doing so would enhance the regime’s ability to repress. While there may be some truth in this view, to use a Guyanese saying, it is not a done deal. This type of thinking is self-defeating and devoid of an understanding of foreign policy history. It was in Trump’s first government that the U.S. State Department report assessed that, as we advance with oil, Guyana needs a more inclusive governance system.
The African community and its political leadership should avoid assuming that the international environment is permanently closed to their concerns. The task is neither blind confrontation nor passive acceptance, but active political struggle and engagement that tests the elasticity of U.S. foreign policy possibilities for advancing equity and a new governance system that ends winner-take-all governance. Only by doing so will we understand what is possible.