Back in February, during a presentation made in the course of the Budget Debate in the National Assembly, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hugh Todd, made a presentation that amounted to an outline of some important aspects of the country’s foreign policy, essentially a ‘brief’ on the intended realignment of some aspects thereof, that took account of the envisaged changes of the economy arising out of the role which it was anticipated the country’s oil resources would play in the shaping of its relations with the rest of the international community, going forward. Whereas, hitherto, the distinguishing features of the country’s foreign policy had been underpinned by a accustomed adherence to the tenets of the United Nations, Caribbean integration and the maintenance of a posture on non-alignment, what the country’s confirmed possession of large deposits of oil and gas meant was that it can now ‘afford’ a foreign policy posture that took greater account of the need to strengthen the country’s economy.
It was, for the most part, oil and what it meant for Guyana’s development that caused the term ‘economic diplomacy’ to become embedded in the country’s foreign policy outlook. Prior to the confirmed existence of significant deposits of oil and gas, the use of the term economic diplomacy had, in fact, amounted to little more than an exercise in vacuous sloganeering. Put differently, what oil meant was that Guyana was now positioned to contemplate the effective use of “the full spectrum of economic tools’ at the state’s disposal in pursuit of the fulfillment of the country’s national interest”. It meant, too, that the state was now better positioned to downplay the ‘ideological’ tenets that had played a considerable role in the writing of the country’s post-independence foreign policy script. At the level of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), for example, Guyana’s voice could be heard much more distinctly than had been the case in previous years on issues that have to do with the development of the region.
Our oil resources and what those meant in terms of promised enhanced global recognition meant that Guyana could now do much more in terms of parading its credentials at the level of the United Nations as part of a broader effort to pointedly parade its credentials on the wider international stage. Efforts to move in that direction were manifested in the country’s deliberately enhanced presence at the 2021 United Nations General Assembly, where both President Ali’s address to the forum and his ‘on-the-sidelines meetings with other Heads of Government attracted a level of international attention that was, in essence, an acknowledgement of the country’s new-found ‘petro power.’ High profile presidential visits to countries like the United Kingdom and India sought not just to uphold long standing bilateral relations but also to begin to send a bankable signal to the rest of the international community that Guyana ‘belonged’. In all of this it was Guyana’s new-found petro resources that were being pressed into service in pursuit of the burnishing of its image and the enhancement of its credentials on the international stage.
Regions to which the government sought to ‘pitch’ its petro-diplomacy were, for the most part, accepting of the fact that if the one-time ‘banana republic’ was still some distance from having ‘gotten there’, its proven oil resources, and more particularly, the brevity of the interregnum between oil recovery and the realization of earnings therefrom, meant that Guyana had become a country to be ‘taken seriously.’ The official investment clarion call appears to have worked too. Over the past three years the country has used the petro magnet to stage gatherings of Heads of Government, oil and gas movers and shakers and potential investors, in pursuit of the placing of a hitherto ‘unnoticed’ Guyana on the global map. Oil has also been the engine that has pushed the government to ‘tinker’ with the long-standing ‘shape’ of the country’s foreign policy, mostly through high profile official visits to the Middle East and just recently, the opening of an Embassy in Qatar.
Africa had been brought “on board,’ too, notably through exchange visits between Guyana and Ghana as part of a wider diplomatic flurry as well as a surge of interest in the strengthening of business ties between Guyana and Africa. The complete redesign of the country’s foreign policy tapestry to ‘accommodate’ its status as a ‘petro power’ still remains a work in progress. That said, up to this time, the most significant accomplishment on this front, up to this time, however, has been the realization of signals of the strengthening of relations at both the bilateral and multilateral levels in areas where ‘ties’ had been, at best, threadbare. The discernable efforts on the part of both Guyana and India to ‘strengthen ties’ is one of the more important elements in what has been more than a mild foreign policy metamorphosis. Not that the historic cultural ties between the two countries and their shared membership of the Commonwealth and the Non-Aligned Movement counted for nothing over the years.
That said it was oil, more specifically India’s enormous oil demand, on the one hand, and Guyana’s new-found petro power, on the other, that now seems set to take relations between the two countries to ‘the next level.’ Here in the Caribbean, there has also occurred a perceptible shift in the timbre of relations between what is now, by some way, the fastest growing economy in a Caribbean Community (CARICOM) where much of the rest of the region has been afflicted by ailments ranging from chronic economic underperformance to – in quite a few instances – acute food insecurity. In the matter of food security, it is Guyana, largely, and Barbados, that are being relied upon to deliver what could turn out to be, for much of the rest of the region, a critical food security intervention.
Incomplete though it is, the script, Guyana’s foreign policy script, going forward, would appear to be taking shape. There are, however, up to this time, imponderables, perhaps the most pointed of these being the future of relations between Guyana and neighbouring Venezuela in the context of our neighbor’s long-standing territorial claim. Whether or not this will become the proverbial downpour on Guyana’s petro parade remains a question for which no clear answer is, as yet, forthcoming.
