Bootlicking dressed as statesmanship

Aug 24, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The recent statement issued by the Government of Guyana on the supposed menace of transnational crime and narco-terrorism reads not like a declaration of sovereign intent, but like the anxious recitation of a provincial servant awaiting instructions from the imperial capital. Cloaked in the moral vocabulary of “zones of peace” and “shared security,” it is less a policy than an act of public obeisance, an unconvincing bow to Washington’s newest conjuring trick of draping its quarrel with Venezuela in the camouflage of a drug war.

Guyana’s misguided statement is not the product of inexperience. Nor is it a case of the faltering first steps of a foreign ministry unsure of its footing – there are solid career diplomats in that Ministry. It is, rather, a case of ineptitude, a surrender of judgment so thorough that it confuses the handcuffs for a handshake.

For the government to mistake the dispatch of an American armada to the Caribbean as some sort of gallant crusade against narco-trafficking is not only naïve, it is willfully blind. Everyone outside of Georgetown can see the ships as staging grounds for regime change. The Americans have said as much by putting a bounty on Nicolás Maduro’s head and branding him a narco-trafficker, a move straight from the imperial playbook. That Guyana alone applauds this masquerade marks it not as vigilant but as servile.

One might have thought that the memory of Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan, two leaders united in their distaste for foreign intrusion, would have inoculated the country against such fawning. Burnham was no stranger to opportunism, Jagan no saint of strategy, but both understood the danger of inviting imperial policemen to patrol the neighborhood. Both rejected the Monroe Doctrine as a relic of the nineteenth century, a doctrine that reduced the Caribbean to an American lake and Latin America to a plantation. Yet here we are, under a government that dresses up its subservience in the language of “cooperation” and “integration,” pretending that a naval blockade is a peacekeeping mission.

The irony is almost too rich. Washington, which has never met a Latin American reformer it did not wish to strangle, now pretends to safeguard democracy in the hemisphere by threatening to topple a government. And Guyana, once a voice against foreign adventurism, now lends itself as the local herald of this charade. To speak of “zones of peace” while applauding the buildup of warships is not diplomacy; it is self-indictment. The government might as well have written its statement on American letterhead.

The sycophancy is not without calculation. Having already conceded the bulk of its oil wealth to ExxonMobil on contracts that read like ransom notes, Guyana now discovers that fealty to the United States is a sort of tax levied on the newly oil-rich. The Americans took our oil, and now they want Venezuela’s. The PPPC government, apparently untroubled by this arithmetic of plunder, contents itself with the role of chorus, repeating the imperial slogans in the hope of securing favor. It is a strategy of bootlicking dressed as statesmanship.

By embracing Washington’s narrative, Guyana risks isolating itself from the rest of South America, a continent long committed to anti-imperialism and allergic to intervention. Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, whatever their differences, understand that sovereignty is not a trinket to be bartered for patronage. If the Americans wish to resurrect the Monroe Doctrine, let them do so alone; it should not be Guyana’s task to provide the local accent for their ventriloquism.

Even if one were to set aside the moral questions, the strategic folly is staggering. What benefit accrues to Guyana from aligning itself with a policy that the rest of the region will denounce? What protection does it secure by fastening itself to a campaign that promises only instability on its western border? The government may believe that loyalty will purchase security, but in imperial politics the client state is always expendable. Today it is Venezuela; tomorrow it may be Guyana, chastised for failing to bow deeply enough.

The statement’s pieties about “transnational organized crime” and “narco-terrorism” deserve little comment, save to note their emptiness. Criminal networks may well threaten democracy and human dignity, but they are not confronted by aircraft carriers. They are confronted by functioning institutions, honest courts, and governments with spines. To pretend that the solution lies in the arrival of an American fleet is to play the fool in a pageant staged for someone else’s applause.

What we are left with, then, is a document that proclaims concern for peace while courting war. It invokes the dignity of the hemisphere while selling out its independence. It is a press release written in the language of sovereignty but intended for the ears of the master. And it is precisely this incoherence, the eagerness to flatter, the incapacity to think that stands as Guyana’s indictment.

Foreign policy, like dignity, is not a gift bestowed by others; it is a habit cultivated by self-respect. The government’s statement reveals neither habit nor respect. It reveals instead a bootlicking opportunism that mistakes compliance for wisdom, sycophancy for diplomacy. In aligning itself with Washington’s aggression, Guyana has not safeguarded its security; it has mortgaged its sovereignty.

And so the record will show: when the empire came calling, the Government of Guyana answered not with caution, not with principle, but with applause. History, less forgiving than Washington, will remember it as the hour when Guyana mistook servitude for strategy, and ineptitude for statecraft.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• Bootlicking, narco-terrorism, Peeping Tom, statesmanship

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