Who’s your daddy?
Today Wayne Brown embarks on a new series entitled In our time, in which he ventures beyond the world of Obama-era US politics.
Forty years ago, a wise old retired Surinamese diplomat chilled the heart of this young idealist when he greeted my naïve expression of hope in the future of Caribbean unity with a corrosive laugh. “Look at that,” he said, gesturing at a map of the Caribbean on his study’s wall. “You can’t even tell for sure that Trinidad isn’t part of South America. Time will soon sort out that little anomaly.”
He meant that Trinidad, little oil-producing Trinidad, was just too close to its giant neighbour Venezuela not to be absorbed by the latter the moment the geopolitical stars fell into the right alignment.
I remembered his prognosis many years later; in 1999, to be precise, when Venezuela’s Chávez abruptly restated his country’s claim to three-fifths of Guyana. There were even rumours of Venezuelan forces moving towards the Guyanese border.
Mercifully for Caribbean nationalists, Mr Chávez was eventually to be distracted by GW Bush’s bungled attempt to overthrow him; and one heard no more of that startling scenario. But in the meantime (“History has many cunning corridors,” observed the poet TS Eliot) Bush-Cheney’s designs on the Middle East’s oil reserves were having their predictable effect, and the price of oil was rising steadily and fast. It rose from $20 a barrel at the start of Bush’s tenure to $140 less than eight years later.
Still, while that escalation hugely benefited Exxon Mobil, it also dramatically increased the clout of America’s old and newly-proclaimed ‘enemies.’ In oil-rich Russia, an economy that had been near-collapse was suddenly flush enough for Vladimir Putin to begin harbouring revisionist dreams, and to put pressure on the newly-independent states that had formed the Soviet Union’s buffer zone. (Ironically, it was 11 months ago — just when the price of oil had crashed — that Russia’s resurgent economy was suddenly expressed in the abrupt little Georgia war that caught the Bush administration flatfooted and impotent.)
In oil-rich Iran, already hugely gifted by the Bush administration’s crippling wars against its hostile neighbours, Afghanistan and Iraq, newly-elected President Ahmadinejad began threatening Israel and intervening in earnest in Iraq on behalf of his fellow-Shiites.
And here in our blameless Caribbean, little oil-and-gas-rich Trinidad and giant oil-rich Venezuela began competing for influence in Caribbean states as big as Cuba and as small as Grenada.
Then, last summer, there came the sudden near-collapse of the global economy, with the concomitant collapse of the price of oil, down from $140 to $40 in the blink of an eye. What an immense moment of doubt, of imperial dreams up in the air, that must have given to… everybody!
Surprisingly — since the world economy is still staggering — the price of oil soon began inching back up. It’s now pushing $70, a price which just about permits the oil-rich nations to resume their expansionist designs — albeit looking over their shoulders, and rather more tentatively than before. (They had had, after all, a bad shock.)
All except Venezuela’s Chávez, that is; Chávez, whose foreign policy has long been the most aggressive in Latin America.
Unlike his neighbours, Chávez wants not only economic but ideological clout, and his overtures, amply greased by oil money, have had considerable success. A socialist inching ever further to the left, Chávez has appropriated to himself the mantle of Cuba’s Castro, and has taken as the goal of his foreign policy what Ché Guevara died trying to achieve: exporting socialism throughout Latin America. The leftist governments — and economies — of Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, as well as impoverished Haiti, Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, and the Dominican Republic, are now firmly in his debt; as was Honduras, at least until the military coup that ousted leftwing President Zelaya there a couple weeks ago.
Moreover, it is easy for Chávez to deploy oil-revenue largesse among the mini-states of the OECS, whose combined population could migrate en masse to Miami on a given day without anyone there noticing. Venezuela is now helping to build an international airport in St Vincent and providing free cooking gas to poor Dominicans, and both island nations, as well as Antigua and Barbuda, have recently joined Chávez’s Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA) grouping, whose chief initiative to date has been its PetroCaribe programme. A fourth member of the OECS is reportedly about to do likewise.
These new alliances have put major cracks, of course, in the already shaky edifice of Caricom.
And they must also be alarming Trinidad’s Manning, who has his own imperial dreams: to wit, absorbing the nine OECS countries into a new Caribbean mini-empire centred on Port of Spain.
The OECS were, and are, nominal nations facing financial ruin, even before the near-collapse of the US economy dealt a crippling blow to their main industry, tourism; and it made sense for them to seek shelter in the skirts of Trinidad’s oil-and-gas economy.
But that was before Chávez noticed how easily he might secure their loyalty.
The result is that the goal of political union between Trinidad and the OECS by November (with economic union to follow two years later) is starting to seem less of a sure thing than it did. It’s not clear whether Manning was punting, threatening, or conceding defeat when he said last week that the ALBA connection of certain OECS states represented a “new development that has to be examined.”
Traditional Caribbean nationalists (formerly, ‘Federation-ists’) are no less alarmed. Warned Shridath Ramphal, OECS membership in ALBA “introduces some ideological dimensions which may not be shared in the region.”
In all this, the elephant in the room is of course the US, which so far has referred to ALBA blandly enough, as just another example of “oil diplomacy” — this, although Danielle de Bruin of the Henry Jackson Society, a rightwing British-based think tank, warned last month of “the socialist trap being laid from the south.”
(Wrote de Bruin, in ‘The Chavez ALBA initiative is the dawn of trouble for the Americas’: “The initiative is a Chavez-Castro socialist plan to undermine the Free Trade Area of the Americas as envisaged by the United States… The United States and the rest of the West need to carefully monitor the situation, and re-engage with the region, in order to ensure that it does not revert to the ‘sea of splashing dominoes’ as it was regarded during the cold war.”)
As his Guyana rehearsal showed, Chávez has not only ideological but territorial and military ambitions. Dominica has “effectively acknowledged,” reports the Miami Herald, “Venezuela’s claim to Bird Island, a claim which the Caribbean states have denied for decades,” and a claim which has “serious implications for the maritime rights of surrounding islands, and that also threatens the United States’ access to Caribbean waters.”
(One wonders whether Mr Manning shouldn’t consider sending his coastguard out to patrol Patos, a barren Trinidad-owned rock in the Gulf of Paria which, for at least half a century, Venezuela has resentfully protested belongs to it.)
And earlier this year, Venezuela and Nicaragua proposed an ALBA military force, the (unlikely) adoption of which could see Venezuelan troops stationed in Antigua, say.
Now, one knows that President Obama has much bigger fish to fry.
But it’s hard to imagine that, behind the scenes, tiny Trinidad and giant USA, each with its own imperial designs, aren’t burning the midnight oil as, between them, they try to decide how to react to ALBA.
