Two Ambassadors, One Prize:

EDITORIAL

Guyana as Battleground in the US–China Great Power Contest

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

May 2026

I. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TIMING WHEN TWO EMPIRES SPOKE

Within days of each other in May 2026, two of the world’s most powerful nations addressed Guyana directly — not through back channels or diplomatic cables, but through the public press, in signed op-eds crafted with evident care and deliberate purpose.

US Ambassador Nicole Theriot marked sixty years of bilateral relations with a warm tribute to partnership, shared history, and the promise of “deeper democracy.” Nine days prior, Chinese Ambassador Yang Yang published a sweeping defense of Beijing’s relationship with Georgetown, titled “Facts Speak Louder Than Words: The Real Story of China–Guyana Cooperation” — using detailed data and pointed language to firmly refute what she called “groundless accusations” by a US congressman about so-called “Chinese influence” in Guyana.

Two ambassadors. Two op-eds. One small nation sitting atop one of the most significant oil discoveries of the twenty-first century.

Coincidence is not a concept that applies to great power diplomacy. What Guyana witnessed in May 2026 was not two friends sending greetings. It was two empires — each with a hundred-year strategic horizon — publicly competing for the allegiance of a nation that has suddenly become indispensable.

Georgetown must read both documents not as tributes, but as bids. And it must read them with eyes wide open.

II. THE AMERICAN BID: WARMTH WITH CONDITIONS

Ambassador Theriot’s op-ed is eloquent, warm, and genuinely appreciative of a partnership that has delivered real benefits to the Guyanese people. But diplomacy, like oil contracts, requires reading the fine print.

Just weeks before her anniversary tribute, Ambassador Theriot sat before a Guyanese television audience and delivered what can only be described as a threat dressed in diplomatic clothing. As the representative of the US Government, she declared it “incredibly dangerous” to start talking about renegotiation of the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement with ExxonMobil — warning that doing so “sends a terrible signal to international investors all over the world.”

The numbers make the stakes plain. In 2024 alone, ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC collectively earned US$8.4 billion in profits from Guyana’s Stabroek Block, while Guyana — despite owning the resource — received just US$2.6 billion. Under the 2016 PSA, 75 percent of oil produced is set aside for the international oil companies to recoup their investments, with only the remaining 25 percent split equally between Guyana and the consortium, alongside a mere 2 percent royalty.

The 2016 agreement prohibits the Government from imposing any windfall tax — and requires Guyana to pay Exxon’s corporate income tax liabilities out of its own share of profit oil.

What makes this position especially extraordinary is its sharp departure from prior US diplomatic posture. In April 2019, then-Ambassador Sarah Ann Lynch stated clearly that “it is within Guyana’s right to renegotiate the controversial Production Sharing Agreement” and that the US “certainly wouldn’t interfere with that.” Ambassador Theriot in April 2026 calls even thinking about renegotiation “incredibly dangerous” and “a very bad idea.” Same flag. Dramatically different instructions.

What changed? The scale of the discovery. With Guyana now producing nearly 900,000 barrels per day and the block proven to hold over 11 billion barrels, the stakes for ExxonMobil — and by extension for Washington — are existential. So serious is the US position that when Undersecretary for Economic Affairs Jacob Helsberg visited recently, though he chose softer language than the Ambassador, his meaning was identical: Washington will not countenance any maneuver that upsets the current arrangement.

III. THE DOUBLE GAME IN PLAIN SIGHT

Ambassador Theriot assures Guyana that Washington stands “firmly” behind its territorial integrity, invoking Secretary Rubio’s 2025 visit to Georgetown as evidence of commitment. And yet, simultaneously, the United States has been engaged in one of the most consequential geopolitical pivots in the Western Hemisphere — a systematic re-engagement with Venezuela, the very nation whose territorial aggression against Guyana the Ambassador so eloquently condemns.

Following the capture of Nicolás Maduro by US forces in January 2026, a 50-million-barrel oil supply deal was announced with the remaining Venezuelan government, new hydrocarbons privatization laws were passed, and the US lifted sanctions on Venezuelan oil trade. By February 2026, OFAC had issued the broadest easing of Venezuela-related sanctions in years. Chevron mentioned Venezuela twelve times in its 2025 lobbying filings. White House meetings with oil executives about Venezuelan reconstruction investment followed days later.

Let the significance of this sink in. Washington’s security guarantee to Guyana and Washington’s commercial re-engagement with Venezuela are not contradictory policies in the minds of American strategists. They are complementary ones. The United States wants stable oil flows from both nations, leverage over both capitals, and the indispensable role of arbiter between them.

This is not cynicism. It is the most rational foreign policy imaginable — from Washington’s perspective. It is only naïve from Georgetown’s.

Washington’s ideal outcome is a Western Hemisphere in which it controls access to two of the region’s most significant oil jurisdictions — Guyana through commercial dominance and security partnership, Venezuela through post-Maduro reconstruction and investment. In that scenario, the United States is not Guyana’s partner. It is Guyana’s landlord

1v.THE CHINESE BID: INFRASTRUCTURE WITH STRINGS UNACKNOWLEDGED

Ambassador Yang Yang’s op-ed is a masterpiece of soft power framing. The facts she presents are largely accurate, and genuinely impressive. By the end of 2025, cumulative Chinese investment in Guyana had reached approximately US$13 billion, while bilateral trade totaled US$2.89 billion — more than double the previous year. Chinese companies built the Bharrat Jagdeo Demerara River Bridge, six regional hospitals now fully operational, and the China–Guyana Joe Vieira Friendship Park. Since 1993, over 300 Chinese medical professionals have treated more than 1.3 million Guyanese patients.

These are not phantom achievements. They are tangible contributions to Guyanese life, and they deserve honest acknowledgment just as the US contributions do.

But Ambassador Yang’s eloquence carefully omits what her government’s global track record makes impossible to ignore. In 2025 alone, developing countries owed China US$35 billion in BRI-related repayments — a record — with US$22 billion of that burden falling on the world’s 75 poorest nations. China’s outstanding overseas BRI debt has surpassed US$1 trillion, with infrastructure projects across multiple regions struggling to meet even interest payments.

Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port was also built under principles of “mutual benefit and win-win cooperation.” It was leased to China for 99 years after debt default.

Guyana is not Sri Lanka. Its oil revenues provide a cushion that most BRI recipients do not have. But a nation flush with new wealth is also a nation newly attractive to predatory partnership structures — and US$13 billion in cumulative Chinese investment, against a Guyanese GDP that was barely US$14 billion as recently as 2022, represents a level of economic penetration that warrants serious scrutiny.

Ambassador Yang’s article was triggered not by goodwill alone, but by a specific challenge: US Congressman Gabe Evans had publicly raised concerns about Chinese influence in Guyana. The fact that a sitting US congressman felt compelled to write about Chinese influence, and that the Chinese Ambassador responded within days through the Guyanese press, tells you everything about what Georgetown has become: a theatre of great power competition being conducted, politely but intensely, on Guyanese soil.

V. CNOOC: THE SILENT PLAYER IN THE ROOM

There is a dimension of the China–Guyana relationship that Ambassador Yang’s lyrical op-ed does not address, and which Ambassador Theriot’s partnership language deliberately obscures: CNOOC — China National Offshore Oil Corporation — is a direct partner in the very Stabroek Block that Washington is so anxious to protect.

CNOOC holds a 25 percent stake in the Stabroek consortium alongside ExxonMobil and Chevron. This means that every barrel produced from Guyana’s most valuable oil asset flows simultaneously to American and Chinese state interests. The two powers publicly competing for Guyana’s geopolitical allegiance are already, quietly, business partners in Georgetown’s oil field.

The battle for Guyana’s allegiance is not merely political. It is a battle over who controls — and who profits from — the extraction of a finite and extraordinary natural resource.

VI. THE PROPOGANDA PARALLEL : READING BOTH OP-EDS TOGETHER

Placed side by side, the Theriot and Yang op-eds reveal a structural similarity that is both instructive and troubling for Guyanese readers.

Both ambassadors lead with history and friendship. Both marshal specific projects and achievements as evidence of benevolent partnership. Both invoke shared values — democracy and sovereignty in Theriot’s case, mutual respect and the Global South in Yang’s. Both are responding, at least in part, to the other power’s moves. And crucially, both are silent about the ways their respective nations’ interests diverge from Guyana’s own.

Theriot does not mention the lopsidedness of the Stabroek contract. Yang does not mention BRI debt diplomacy. Theriot celebrates Exxon’s community investment signs in Mabaruma without noting that Exxon earned US$4.7 billion from Guyana in 2024 alone. Yang celebrates the Demerara River Bridge without disclosing the full terms of the financing that built it.

Both documents are truthful in what they include. Both are strategic in what they omit. That is the definition of propaganda — not fabrication, but selective presentation in service of national interest.

VII. THE GEOPOLITICAL TRAP: CHOOSING SIDES IN SOMEONE ELSE’S WAR

The deepest danger facing Guyana in this moment is not Venezuela’s territorial aggression, though that is real. It is not the lopsided oil contract, though that requires correction. It is the gravitational pull toward choosing sides in a US–China rivalry that Guyana did not start, does not control, and could be badly damaged by.

Washington wants Guyana firmly in the Western camp — a reliable partner against Chinese influence in the Caribbean and a secure platform for American energy interests. Beijing wants Guyana as a Belt and Road success story, a CNOOC-holding ally, and a demonstration that the Global South can build prosperity outside the US-dominated financial architecture.

Both wants are legitimate from their respective perspectives. Neither is primarily about Guyana’s wellbeing.

The nations that have fared best in this rivalry are those that have refused to be captured by either pole — that have taken infrastructure from China while maintaining security ties with the West, extracted investment from both without surrendering sovereign decision-making to either. Vietnam. Indonesia. Brazil, under its more strategically coherent moments. These are the models Georgetown should study.

Lord Palmerston settled the matter in 1848: nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. Both Washington and Beijing operate on that doctrine. So must Georgetown.

VIII. WHAT SOVEREIGN GUYANA LOOKS LIKE

Genuine sovereignty in Guyana’s current position looks like this:

It takes the US security guarantee seriously while refusing to become a wholly owned subsidiary of American foreign policy. It welcomes Chinese infrastructure investment while insisting on transparent loan terms, competitive bidding, and contractual protections against asset seizure. It renegotiates the Stabroek Block agreement toward terms that reflect the now-known scale of the discovery — not because it is anti-American, but because it is pro-Guyanese. It builds military and intelligence relationships with Brazil, the United Kingdom, India, and CARICOM alongside its American MOU. And it uses its Natural Resource Fund as a genuine sovereign wealth instrument, not a political tool.

It reads every op-ed published by a foreign ambassador — however eloquently written, however warmly intended — as what it is: a bid, not a gift.

One American ambassador said Guyana had every right to renegotiate its oil contract. Another called it “incredibly dangerous” even to raise the subject. One Chinese ambassador builds hospitals and bridges while her government’s BRI architecture has placed dozens of developing nations in unsustainable debt. The world’s most powerful nations have revealed, through these contradictions, that their relationship with Guyana is fundamentally transactional.

There is no shame in that. Transactional relationships can be enormously beneficial — if both parties understand the transaction clearly. Guyana must understand the transaction clearly.

IX. A MESSAGE TO BOTH AMBASSADORS

To Ambassador Theriot: We value the sixty-year relationship. We honor the highway, the vaccines, the security partnership, and the genuine commitment to our sovereignty against Venezuelan aggression. We ask only that you extend to us the same honest respect you would give a true sovereign partner — including the acknowledgment that Guyana has every right, as your predecessor confirmed, to seek fair terms for its own natural resources.

To Ambassador Yang: We are grateful for the hospitals, the bridge, the medical brigades, and the trade relationship that has grown impressively. We ask only that you accompany those gifts with full transparency about loan terms, contract conditions, and the documented experience of other nations that walked the Belt and Road before us.

To both: Guyana is not a prize. It is not a theatre. It is not a demonstration project for your competing visions of world order.

It is a sovereign nation, newly wealthy, historically overlooked, and finally in a position to demand that the world treat it accordingly.