The most fundamental interest of a country is its security. This is not to say that states do not have other interests; they do, and among those are prosperity and social well-being. But states fade into insignificance, unless they can protect their physical integrity. Right now, our security is threatened by Venezuela, which has been ratcheting up its aggression ever since Exxon struck oil off our shores in 2015. The facts are so well known that they do not need to be rehearsed; save to note that even with the just concluded Argyle Declaration, Venezuela continues to openly and notoriously annex two-thirds of our national territory, contained in the Essequibo.
In 1966 Venezuela annexed our half of Ankoko Island, and, to date, we have not attempted to recover it, even as we continue teaching our schoolchildren that Guyana remains the 83,000 square miles we possessed before Ankoko was seized.
The question has to be asked, ‘Why not?’ States usually employ one or more foreign policy instruments; for instance: alliances, arms sales, dispute resolution at the World Court, foreign aid and cultural soft power, diplomacy; or they war to secure their interests, depending upon their domestic, political, and economic conditions etc. If they are acting rationally, states generally would weigh the costs versus the benefits before choosing a course of action. While I have not seen any definitive statement on our inaction on Venezuela’s Ankoko seizure, the implicit assumption appeared to have been that the costs would have outweighed the benefits, since our portion of Ankoko was “only” 3 square miles. We were definitely no match for the Venezuelan armed forces – which is why the Venezuelans decided to invade – and it would appear we did not even possess the money to take diplomatic and legal recourse to the international multilateral institutions.
Since 1966, Venezuela has buttressed its foreign policy option to wage war by inexorably increasing its armed might, whether their governments were dictatorships, democratic or authoritarian, as it presently is under Maduro. This became especially true under Chavez, after he was elected president in 1998 following his failed coups earlier in the decade; and was intensified by Maduro, who succeeded him in 2013. Starting from ground zero in 2005, Venezuela purchased over four billion dollars’ worth of military hardware – including 24 Russian-made Sukhoi Su-30 MK2 fighter jets; 53 military helicopters and 100,000 AK-47 rifles – from Russia, which it declared to be an ally versus the US, to which Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution was implacably opposed. He supported FARC guerrillas in Colombia, and launched alternative regional groupings such as ALBA and oil aid to the Caribbean mini-states with Petrocaribe. Even Guyana benefitted from the seeming generosity of Petrocaribe, and there were murmurs of finding a common cause against the old “imperialists”. Under Maduro, there has been an additional US$15 billion in arms’ purchases from Russia.
Regarding the participants, the Argyle Declaration “reiterated their commitment to Latin America and the Caribbean remaining a Zone of Peace”. If Venezuela believe in peace, then they must be following Clausewitz’s reaffirmation of the venerable Roman dictum that “if you want peace, prepare for war.” Meaning, of course, that any potential aggressor would be deterred by a strong response, and peace would most likely ensue.
We can only look at the actions of Venezuela towards us since 2015 and conclude their foreign policy instrument to wage war against us was encouraged by our continued anaemic capabilities in this area. To secure a strong peace, we must be capable of exercising the option of waging a credible war. Ironically, the very circumstance that stimulated Venezuelan aggression has also given us the wherewithal to explore options other than the judicial route we have chosen up to now because of the Exxon Bonus.
As we suggested two weeks ago, it is time that we have a fully functional military base in Essequibo, to which we can permit the US access as we strengthen our alliance with that nation beyond our common commitment to democracy. Our security interest is matched not only by their interest in protecting their corporation Exxon, which has been given notice by Venezuela to leave, but also in their wider interest for the Western Hemisphere, in which it is situated, to be a zone of peace occupied by democratic states.
