Quote:The Military-Political Game In Guyana
The US is exploiting its latest proxy client, Guyana, in order to open up a second ground front in the containment of Venezuela. Franco Vielma, in a translated article for The Saker, brilliantly explains how this came to be. To summarize his detailed research (which the reader is highly recommended to read in full), Venezuela and Guyana have been engaged in an over-100-year-long territorial dispute stemming from the UK’s colonial seizure of a large swath of Eastern Venezuela. Although the 1899 Paris Arbitration Award set the current borders, the 1966 Geneva Agreement invalidated its predecessor, but retained the status quo until a joint resolution could be worked out between them. Guyana, however, was reluctant to see this happen, recognizing the potential energy wealth lying underneath both the mainland and maritime portions of the disputed territory that it controls. When Exxon Mobil prospected for oil in the disputed maritime area, Venezuela saw t he writing on the wall of an imminent destabilization and knew that it had to act in protecting its territorial claim before it could be stolen out from under it, ergo the 26 May decree establishing the Zodimains, one of which cut into the contested area (the other was in the Gulf of Venezuela and was described earlier).
Mr. Vielma rightly notes that Venezuela took this step in order to preempt the deployment of affiliated mercenaries by Exxon in securing its potential offshore resource stake, which could eventually even gain a mainland component someday. He also makes proper mention of the US’ strategic interests in all issues related to energy, arguing that prospective major finds in Guyana would surely place the country front and center on the Pentagon’s radar and invigorate full-spectrum bilateral relations, including in the military sphere. Taking that into account, it’s thus worthwhile to sketch out where the situation is headed, and how it fits into the larger strategy of containing Venezuela.
Here’s the three-step escalation plan that Venezuela must prepare to deal with:
Quote:1. Attract US Attention:
Guyana wants to transnationalize the crisis and move it past the realm of Venezuelan-Guyanese bilateral relations. It had hoped that its CARICOM allies , some of which are also ALBA members (Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines), would issue a strong declaration of support for its side, which would then escalate the issue to one of regional attention and create friction between the Caribbean members of ALBA and the Venezuelan core. While ultimately not worded as strongly as Guyana would have preferred, the regional grouping did take its side in the dispute after a three-day summit in Barbados, showing that the topic has officially become one of international importance and raising the possibility of a larger fissure within ALBA.
The US saw CARICOM’s support of Guyana as a trigger for its own diplomatic involvement, with the American Ambassador to Georgetown expectedly issuing his own statement in support of the country, too. Thus, the crisis has expanded to hemispheric proportions and the door has been opened for further American involvement in it. This could predictably see a rotating presence of US warships stationed in the disputed maritime area, supposedly to ‘protect’ the Exxon prospectors from the Venezuelan navy. Along the same lines, the US Navy could also base its operations out of the port of Georgetown, which it previously called port at for the first time in 2010, showing that there is indeed a precedent that could be built upon in expanding bilateral maritime cooperation with Guyana.
Quote:2. Divide Venezuela’s Military Focus:
The appearance of US naval vessels and their expected ground component counterparts in Guyana would instantaneously elicit an angry response from Venezuela, which would likely attempt to counter it with a reinforcement of military assets along the border. One needs to keep in mind that the Venezuelan military has up until this point paid less attention to Guyana than it has to Colombia, so an urgent focus on the eastern border would be something akin to a military pivot of sorts. Additionally, this region is scarcely populated and infrastructure development is at a bare minimum, meaning that this will be somewhat of a different operational environment for the military than it is accustomed to as regards Colombia. Complicating matters even further is that the military must still retain a sizeable presence in the country’s major cities in order to deter and respond to any Color Revolution destabilizations, so it must consequently enact a careful balance between this priority as well as its deployments along the Colombian and Guyanese borders. All of this serves to divide the Venezuelan military from a concentrated focus on any singular crisis spot that erupts (be it Colombia, Guyana, or a Color Revolution), and the simultaneous opening of all three fronts would represent a doomsday scenario for its strategic planners.
3. Entrap Venezuela In A Disastrous Military Campaign:
The US’ grand strategic goal is to coax Venezuela into a military intervention to restore its historical sovereignty up to the Essequibo River. It’s not being argued that Venezuela shouldn’t reestablish control up until this point or that it has no grounds to do so, but rather that such a move, if it takes a military dimension (no matter if it’s to preempt an American deployment in the area or to respond to a Guyanese provocation), entails significant tangential costs that might not be recognized at first glance. It’s not as simple as beating a much weaker military foe, but in holding and administering dense jungle territory with barely any infrastructure to speak of. This is an enormous hurdle for even the most advanced global militaries, to say nothing of a regional mid-rate power like Venezuela’s, although it does have a bit of a competitive edge over them because of its own jungle terrain that its soldiers are accustomed to training in.
Quote:The problem, however, is that the area being claimed by Venezuela is about 56,121 square miles large, which to put it a different way, is about the size of Nepal (or one-fifth the size of Venezuela’s currently governed territory). Administering such a vast and difficult-to-traverse area carries with it enormous financial costs and creates a plethora of military vulnerabilities to stay-behind US-supported guerrilla forces. There’s a serious risk that Venezuela could find itself quickly engaged in a mission creep scenario where it ultimately overstretches its military forces and creates strategic openings for provocations coming from Colombia and the Color Revolutionaries. Compounding this risk, an extended military campaign, wrought with financial burdens and piling casualties, could escalate dissent at home and increase the risk that the next expected Color Revolution attempt could gain wider support and perhaps succeed in toppling the government (especially if it’s aided by surgical ‘anti-FARC’ strikes and complementary ‘limited incursions’ by the Colombian military).
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Guyana has fast emerged as a major strategic vulnerability for the Venezuelan leadership, in that it presents a Catch-22 dilemma which must be responded to in one way or another. If Caracas concedes to Georgetown’s oil exploration in disputed waters and allows Exxon to drill there, then it essentially cedes the maritime zone to Guyana once and for all. However, by responding to this clear provocation, Venezuela has unintentionally initiated a process whereby Guyana will can now escalate the crisis to regional and hemispheric proportions, all with the ultimate goal of inviting the US military as a de-facto party to the conflict, albeit on its side. Furthermore, because Venezuela is in a much better military position against Guyana than it is against Colombia, it can be expected the Pentagon would accelerate any assistance it renders to Georgetown in order to rapidly mend the military imbalance as best as it could (perhaps substituting its conventional inequality with asymmetrical advantages such as unconventional warfare training ). There’s no ‘silver bullet’ solution to the Guyanese threat, showing that Venezuela must carefully mind all of its options and their expected consequences before taking its next step.
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