There is no doubt that the core aspects of Guyana’s foreign policy will remain unchanged, save for a few new challenges. The PPP had always known of the importance of the role of Britain and the United States in Guyana’s politics. The British suspended the Constitution in 1953 and opened the door to US interference in 1962. The PPP was aware that it was US support and British silence that sustained the PNC dictatorship in office and that it was the withdrawal of their support that ended its 28 years in opposition in 1992.
But after 20 years in office, a new PPP leadership, forgetting the PPP’s choices in the Cold War, unburdened by the memories of the traumatic struggles and suffering engendered by the struggles for democracy and intoxicated with a sense of its own invulnerability by its longevity in power, began to imagine that it had a degree of flexibility that really did not exist. Hence the PPP did not, or could not, have understood what surely would have been Washington’s horror at the Government’s attempt to establish relations with Iran and its abstention on the vote in the UN condemning Russia’s seizure of the Crimea. This ‘independent’ foreign policy course culminated in the public humiliation of the US’s Ambassador at the celebration of US Independence. The PPP lost office.
