Gunboat Diplomacy: Without the Guns and Boats

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Gunboat Diplomacy: Without the Guns and Boats

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar October 2026

Washington has found that tariffs, sanctions and visa revocations do what cruisers once did, and Guyana should understand what that means for a small state in the middle of it.

The gunboat was never really about the gun. It was about the message that a small state’s choices had a price, set elsewhere and collected without a declaration of war. What has changed in the Western Hemisphere is that the gunboat no longer needs a hull. A tariff schedule, a Treasury designation, a revoked visa and a conditional credit line carry the same message, at lower cost and with a deniability the old navies never had.

Pedro Abramovay of Open Society makes a useful distinction in his recent essay on the future of multilateralism. The post-Cold War order, he argues, was built for a unipolar moment, tolerant of minimal states and austerity, and deaf to demands for shared prosperity. It is now being replaced not by a vacuum but by a contest between two models.

One is a multilateralism of strong states that insist cooperation be grounded in national and regional priorities. The other is raw might-makes-right, which treats sovereignty as something to be rationed. Latin America is where that contest is playing out in real time.

Coercion as an electoral instrument

The rightward drift across the hemisphere is real, but the causal story deserves care. Crime, inflation and exhausted incumbents have moved voters in Latin America for years, and no honest editorial should pretend Washington invented those grievances. What coercion adds is an accelerant and a price tag. When a government’s creditworthiness, tariff exposure or leaders’ travel documents depend on its alignment, an election stops being only a domestic choice.

It becomes a referendum on whether the country can afford to be defiant. Voters understand that arithmetic even when no one states it. Support for aligned candidates, whether through endorsements, rescue facilities or a sudden softening of sanctions, tells the electorate which outcome the powerful will reward.

This is the real innovation. Old interventionism needed a coup. The new version needs only to make dissent expensive and compliance visible, and then let the domestic politics do the rest. It leaves no occupation to resist, no dictator to denounce, and often a legitimately elected government at the end of the process. That makes it harder to name and harder to fight.

What the Venezuela precedent teaches

Abramovay lists, among the unravelings of the order, the seizure of a sitting-then-former Venezuelan president by the United States. For Guyana this cannot be filed as a distant event. It is the demonstration that the outer limit of coercion is now unmarked. If a neighbour’s head of state can be removed by force, the line between pressure and invasion has been redrawn by the party doing the pressing.

Guyana’s official posture has been to treat this as favorable. Venezuela’s claim on the Essequibo has been the central threat to the country’s territory for decades, and a Washington willing to act decisively looks like a guarantor. But a guarantee is not a right. Protection of this kind is rented, and the landlord sets the terms.

The rent being paid

Consider what Guyana has agreed to in this period: a third-country deportee framework whose vetting, accommodation and legal basis the public cannot examine; a security architecture of memoranda on air-domain awareness; and a deep-water port at Berbice whose financing has shifted from earlier Chinese interest toward American-linked capital. Each can be defended on its own terms. Together they describe a state aligning itself, and doing so without Parliament having meaningfully weighed in.

A legislature that has sat only a handful of times in nearly thirteen months is not a body that scrutinizes the terms of a hemisphere-shaping bargain.

Here Abramovay’s argument cuts against the government’s own instincts. His claim is that states able to deliver at home have more voice abroad. Guyana’s bargaining position is strongest not when it signs fastest but when its institutions are strong enough to say what it will not sign.

Secrecy is not a negotiating advantage. It is a signal to the counterparty that no domestic constraint exists, and counterparties price that in.

The oil state’s particular exposure

There is a second vulnerability. Guyana’s economy rests on a single resource under a contract negotiated in 2016, operated by a company whose home government is the same one now wielding the tariffs. A small state whose revenue, security guarantee and migration arrangements all run through one capital has no leverage left to trade. That is the condition coercion exploits best, and it is the condition Guyana has built for itself.

What a strong state would do

The answer is not defiance for its own sake. Guyana has genuine security needs, and no serious person argues it should dismiss American help. The answer is to convert dependence into terms. Publish the deportee framework and legislate its limits. Table the security memoranda in the National Assembly. Treat the CARICOM and Latin American groupings as insurance rather than ceremony, since the coalitions Abramovay describes, middle powers and Global South states acting together, are the only counterweight a country of this size can assemble. And press the legal route on the border, where the International Court of Justice remains one of the few arenas in which a small state and a large one are formally equal.

The gunboat has changed form, but the lesson of the old one still holds. Small states that are seen to be unconditionally aligned are not protected. They are simply taken for granted.