The View From Next Door

The View From Next Door

What Venezuela’s Oil Surrender Should Teach Guyana

EDITORIAL◊ANALYSIS BY: Hem Kumar —September 2026

There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from watching a neighbor’s house catch fire and realizing your fence shares a boundary line with the blaze. That is the position Guyana now occupies, watching Washington and Caracas;  or what remains of governance in Caracas — carve up 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oi in a deal that Elliott Abrams, no stranger to the machinery of US Venezuela policy, has called something close to a betrayal of the very people Washington claims to be liberating.

Abrams’s analysis, published in the Washington Post, deserves to be read in Georgetown with the kind of discernment that only proximity can sharpen. He is not a hostile critic of American power in the region. He is a former Trump administration official; the special representative for Venezuela in Trump’s first term;  writing from inside the tent, and even he cannot dress this up as anything other than what it is: a hundred-year grant of a nation’s mineral wealth, negotiated with an unelected government, delivered to a businessman under a Swiss arrest warrant, with no payment to the Venezuelan people and no mandate from them either.

The paradox is not subtle. The same administration that toppled Maduro in January under the banner of restoring democracy has now pivoted to guaranteeing the permanence of his successor, Delcy Rodríguez;  installed, unelected, and by every credible polling measure deeply unpopular against opposition leader María Corina Machado. Abrams’s framing is precise: Trump wanted stability and democracy in January; six months later, he wants oil, and stability has become a euphemism for whichever government signs the paperwork.

WHY GUYANA CANNOT WATCH THIS AS A BYSTANDER

Guyana’s instinct — understandable, even sensible in the short term ; will be to treat this as a Venezuela story. It is not. It is a story about the terms on which Washington is now willing to transact for hydrocarbons in this hemisphere, and Guyana is the other petrostate in the room.

Three flags belong on Georgetown’s desk, not Caracas’s:

First, the equity-versus-royalty distinction matters more than it did a month ago. The Venezuela structure — a 35 percent US equity stake in a private company plus rights to 20 percent of output for a century, without payment  is a materially different animal from a production-sharing agreement negotiated with an elected government under its own hydrocarbons law, however imperfect that law’s terms may be. Guyana has spent years litigating, publicly and otherwise, the adequacy of the 2016 Stabroek PSA. That fight, whatever its outcomes, has occurred inside a framework of elected government and — a nominally  domestic legal process. Venezuela shows what the alternative looks like when the government signing is not accountable to anyone who can vote it out.

Second, watch who Washington is willing to sit across the table from. Abrams is explicit that officials in this administration lobbied to help Alejandro Betancourt — the businessman at the centre of the deal,  resolve a Swiss money-laundering warrant and clear his travel restrictions. That is not a detail. That is a data point about how far commercial expedience now travels inside US foreign policy when oil is the prize. A government willing to launder a crony’s legal exposure in Caracas is a government worth watching closely wherever else it is negotiating extraction rights.

Third, the elections test is the tell:  and it applies regionally, not just to Venezuela. Abrams names it directly: if Washington starts arguing that 2027 elections in Venezuela are “too difficult,” that will be proof the oil deal was the sellout it appears to be. Guyana should apply the same test to its own relationship with Washington — not because anyone is predicting an equivalent scenario here, but because the instinct to treat electoral timelines as negotiable when commercial interests are at stake is exactly the instinct this deal reveals. It is worth asking, publicly and often, whether any accountability language in Guyana’s own security and economic MoUs with the US carries teeth, or whether it is aspirational the way Trump’s January democracy pledge to Venezuela turned out to be.

THE DISTINCTION GUYANA MUST HOLD ONTO

None of this is an argument that American capital or American security cooperation is inherently corrosive to Guyana. The free flow of investment, under rule of law, is precisely what Abrams credits for Guyana’s own oil expansion;  he cites it approvingly as the model Venezuela should have followed. That is worth Georgetown’s attention too: the piece treats Guyana as the positive counterexample to what is happening in Venezuela.

But a model only holds if the underlying conditions that earned the compliment stay true — elected government, functioning legal process, deals that survive public scrutiny. Guyana’s task, watching this fire next door, is not to assume immunity because a foreign policy op-ed happened to name-check it favourably. It is to ask, with the same discernment Abrams is applying to Venezuela, whether every one of its own arrangements: port financing, security MoUs, the Stabroek PSA’s unresolved terms — would survive the same test if the names were changed.

Tread softly does not mean tread silently. It means Guyana’s institutions: parliamentary, civil society, and press  need to be doing the auditing work now, while the comparison is instructive and cheap, rather than after the fact, when it becomes merely descriptive.

THE INSTRUMENTS THAT DESERVE THE TEST, NAMED

Abstraction is easy to nod along to and easy to forget. Guyana’s own instruments should be named, not gestured at:

The air domain awareness — drone MoU (August 12, 2026). A US$2 million agreement, signed by Foreign Minister Hugh Todd and Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, for unmanned aerial systems and surveillance cooperation, framed around counter-narcotics and organized crime. No public detail exists on data-sharing architecture, who controls the surveillance feed, or what operational access Washington gains in exchange. A modest dollar figure should not be mistaken for a modest arrangement — the Betancourt precedent shows Washington’s willingness to extend far more than money buys when the strategic prize is right. This MoU has never been tested publicly against the question: what does the US get, precisely, and does Guyana’s Parliament know the answer?

The Bechtel/Hess Berbice deepwater port arrangement (2025-26). A feasibility study cost-shared between the Guyanese government and Hess Corporation — itself a Stabroek Block consortium partner;  for a port whose Chinese pre-feasibility predecessor (2015, China State Construction Engineering Company) appears to have simply lapsed rather than been formally superseded. A port financed and built by the same commercial interests that hold the offshore concession is not automatically corrupt, but it is automatically a conflict worth naming, and worth asking whether the Modern Port Act contains any provision addressing foreign operational control.

The underlying Stabroek PSA itself. Years of accountability argument about the adequacy of its terms have proceeded on the assumption that the signatory government was elected and answerable. Venezuela is the demonstration of what changes when that assumption fails. Guyana’s advantage is that the assumption currently holds — which is precisely why it is worth defending rather than taking for granted.

None of these three should be read as accusations. They should be read as the specific, named list of things Georgetown’s press, Parliament, and civil society owe scrutiny to now, while the Venezuela comparison is fresh enough to be instructive rather than merely retrospective.

THE PATTERN, AND WHAT IT MAY PREVIEW

Here the Venezuela deal stops being an instructive analogy and starts being a warning. Abrams’s elections test — watch whether Washington argues 2027 is “too difficult” for Venezuela;  is not a one-off tell. It is a pattern, and patterns repeat with the players who set them.

The precedent sits uncomfortably close to home already. The Venezuela oil arrangement was made possible in part because Chinese and Russian commercial presence was displaced from the field first — the ground was cleared before the deal was cut. That sequencing is not incidental. It is close to a playbook: reduce the rival power’s footprint, then negotiate the resource access that follows.

Guyana should read its own moment through that lens rather than assume immunity. If murmurs begin circulating from within the Trump administration  officials, envoys, or surrogates encouraging or applying pressure toward the reduction of Chinese investment, infrastructure participation, or commercial presence in Guyana, that should not be read as an isolated ask. It should be read as a prompt, consistent with the pattern next door, and it raises questions Georgetown cannot afford to leave rhetorical:

What, specifically, does Washington want from Guyana in exchange for its continued strategic backing? What would the Ali administration be asked to concede — access, equity, basing rights, surveillance data, port control — and on what terms? Would such concessions be structured as genuine partnership, or would they follow the Caracas model: an arrangement that entrenches the current government’s convenience rather than the country’s long-term interest, granted in exchange for facilitation rather than earned through accountable governance? And beneath all of it, the harder question: is Washington’s interest in Guyana’s stability conditional on this particular government remaining in power indefinitely — or would it, as in Venezuela, tolerate real democratic contestation even if that contestation produced an outcome less convenient to American commercial interests?

These are not accusations either. They are the legitimate questions a country watching its neighbour’s house burn should be asking about its own wiring, before the smoke reaches this side of the fence.

— The Board