The Same Playbook, Two Oil Coasts: What the Atlantic Council’s Venezuela Warnings Say About Guyana’s Bargain

The Same Playbook, Two Oil Coasts: What the Atlantic Council’s Venezuela Warnings Say About Guyana’s Bargain

Extractive Governance & Geopolitics

EDITORIAL BY:  Hem Kumar — September 2026

Two former U.S. energy officials have just published, under the Atlantic Council’s own letterhead, a four-part indictment of the administration’s Venezuela oil concession — and in doing so, they have handed Guyana a diagnostic checklist it should be applying to its own arrangements with Washington.

David Goldwyn and Andrea Clabough are not activists or opposition partisans. Goldwyn ran international energy affairs at the State Department; Clabough studies the sector for a living. When analysts of that pedigree question whether a U.S. government body has any legal standing to hold equity in a foreign nation’s constitutionally protected resources, whether an unelected government can bind its successors to a hundred-year bargain, and whether a captive-buyer arrangement actually serves the host country’s interests — those questions do not evaporate at the Essequibo River. They travel.

THE DEAL IN DISPUTE

The arrangement under scrutiny would hand a newly formed private company, fronted by a Venezuelan businessman under a Swiss money-laundering warrant, a hundred-year concession over seventeen oil fields holding an estimated 65 billion barrels. The U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Capital takes a reported 55 percent of output, including an equity stake and a standing right to buy oil at cost — structured, transparently, to refill the depleted U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It was signed not by Venezuela’s elected president, but by Delcy Rodríguez, head of an interim government whose legitimacy her own domestic opposition disputes.

Goldwyn and Clabough’s four questions are worth stating plainly, because each has a Guyanese analogue this paper has already been asking. Will the arrangement reassure investors who have stayed on the sidelines, or does its opacity deepen their caution? Does it rest on a legal foundation the host constitution can actually bear? Does it enjoy political durability across a change of government, in either country? And does it change anything on the ground, or merely relocate the extraction rights without solving the underlying capacity and governance deficits?

GUYANA’S VERSION OF THE SAME FOUR QUESTIONS

This publication has tracked, since August, the parallel positioning of American capital and security interests inside Guyana — the shift of Berbice deep-water port financing from early Chinese pre-feasibility interest toward Bechtel and Hess, the new air-domain-awareness and drone MoU signed alongside Deputy Secretary Landau’s economic pitch, and Washington’s own confirmed equity stake in the Venezuelan fields sitting a short flight from the Stabroek Block. None of that is identical to the Venezuela concession. But Goldwyn and Clabough’s underlying test — does the legal form of an arrangement survive scrutiny independent of who is offering it, or how urgently — applies with equal force to the Stabroek Production Sharing Agreement this paper has spent four installments examining.

The Stabroek Surrender series has already established that Guyana’s own 2016 PSA lacks ring-fencing between cost pools, meaning new discoveries such as Uaru and Whiptail can quietly re-enter the same undivided recovery pool that Exxon’s $55 billion in prior costs just emptied from. Ram’s Article 32.1 argument — that renegotiation requires only the operator’s consent, not legal impossibility — is a domestic version of Goldwyn and Clabough’s second question: is the legal foundation of the arrangement as fixed as the government insists, or is ‘sanctity of contract’ invoked selectively, extended to foreign operators and withheld from the audit deadlines and gas feasibility studies the same contract requires of the state?

THE POLITICAL-DURABILITY TEST, APPLIED AT HOME

The Atlantic Council piece’s third question — can an agreement signed by a government of contested legitimacy bind whatever government follows it — is not one Guyana can wave off as someone else’s problem. Guyana’s own executive has negotiated security and infrastructure arrangements with Washington (the air-domain-awareness MoU, the Berbice port shift, the third-country deportee framework) with limited parliamentary scrutiny and no public disclosure of full terms. The 13th Parliament has sat only four or five times in nearly 300 days. An arrangement negotiated in that vacuum inherits the same durability question Rodríguez’s Venezuelan concession faces: what happens to it when the political balance shifts, and who, precisely, agreed to be bound?

Goldwyn and Clabough’s fourth question — does the arrangement change the underlying reality, or simply relocate who profits from extraction without fixing what was broken — is perhaps the most transferable of all. Seventeen Venezuelan oil fields reportedly lack basic electricity, processing equipment, and pipeline connections; a hundred-year concession does not build that infrastructure by itself. Guyana’s own record of unbuilt promises — the solar programme accountability gap, the GWI sanitation mandate question, the Kimbia bean facility’s unverifiable anchor producer — should make Guyanese readers instinctively skeptical of any arrangement, foreign or domestic, whose headline figure substitutes for a delivery plan.

WHAT THIS PAPER WILL BE WATCHING

We do not print this comparison to suggest Guyana’s PSA and Venezuela’s concession are the same instrument — they are not, and the differences (an operating Guyanese state versus an interim Venezuelan one; a signed 2016 agreement versus a still-unfolding 2026 one) matter. What we intend is narrower and, we think, more useful: two credentialed former U.S. officials have just published, without any Guyana-specific intent, a due-diligence framework for evaluating exactly this kind of asymmetric bilateral bargain.

Guyanese civil society, Parliament, and the press should be running Guyana’s own arrangements with Washington through that same framework — not because the answers are foreordained, but because no one else is going to ask the questions for us.

— The Board