Guyana and Guyana

Aug 09, 2023 Editorial

Kaieteur News – The Dr. Irfaan Ali led PPP/C Government is playing with fire. The more that Guyana and President Ali play this tricky game of friendship with China, the more there is baiting of America. The PPP/C Government owes its existence in the corridors of power to America, and it is a state that can be smartly reversed. China is a threat to America’s interests; hence, its growing intolerance for China to have any meaningful presence regionally, which America views as its own playground, so to speak.

President Ali visits China, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping is all smiles and red-carpet welcome. Guyana is being fattened up for careful tending; slow marinating in the sauces of both short-term and long-term Chinese visions. This country has oil and other natural resource riches in abundance, with possibly even more still to be discovered. China has its eyes on a nice slice of those, with lips drooling at the prospect. Guyana is within this hemisphere, which positions it physically close to America, and for China that is a priceless boon. The commercial prospects for state-owned Chinese firms in non-natural resource sectors are also vibrant with rich potential, and the men from the distant East gear up for action, to seize opportunities.

All this makes China a competitor of significant strength in Guyana to America, and a presence of much geopolitical and geostrategic power in this area. This is not to America’s liking, and it is almost a certainty that our partners and helpers from the north have made their position sharply and clearly to President Ali and Vice President Jagdeo. Both have reacted with obedient Boy Scouts’ pledges in public, but nobody is fooled, most of all the Americans. This is because the Chinese presence in Guyana is so broad and deep, to America’s anxiety. Though the Chinese are part of the troika that is the ExxonMobil-led consortium exploring and producing in Guyana’s rich oil fields, the very idea has to be causing some tension in American quarters. Too close for comfort and too tight to keep the Chinese out of the manipulations and schemes that Guyanese suspect to be happening at sea, and about which they are clueless.

The reality could be that both the Americans and Chinese are working together to give Guyana the shaft, while the leaders of these two ferociously competing superpowers are both trying to get this country to choose one over the other. It was President Ali himself, who said that we do not have the luxury of getting entangled in big power manoeuvres, and that we have to coexist with everyone. The downside of trying to please everyone is that Guyana could end up pleasing no one, with the consequence of doing injustices to its own priorities and interests.

Americans have always had, and even more so now, the upper hand in the affairs of Guyana. Though this may be officially denied, the records of the distant past and in the more recently interlude of 2019-2020, stand as powerful testimony of the dominant role of America in Guyana’s domestic matters. Because America has involved it so much, and given so much, to Guyana, there is the expectation that it will be the sole power player in this country. With massive quantities of now proven oil reserves, Guyana assumes still more significance in American visions and calculations, especially when consideration is given to negative Middle East and other developments. This means that there is less and less patience for China to have any kind of presence in the local environment.

It is why we harbour concerns that the slippery game that the PPP/C Government is playing could backfire in its face. The fact that, though President Ali and Vice President Jagdeo were called to Washington for urgent conversations with Secretary of State Blinken, and it was still found necessary for him to come here not many months later, indicates that the Americans are unsettled. It is not over energy or food security, or any other security. Instead, it had to be about America’s deep insecurity over China’s big footprint here. Time is not on the PPP/C Government’s side: its leadership will have to pick one: China or America, soon.

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China, Editorial, Guyana

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