Armed invasions of South America to secure mineral wealth of the type Donald Trump launched in Venezuela on Saturday aren’t as productive as they might look. The gold and silver that the 16th-century Spanish conquistadors looted from the Aztec and Inca civilisations may have enriched them personally, but it ended up financing destructive wars and creating economic distortion and corruption back home.
Now, the limited amount of oil that the US can take from Venezuela in the medium term — its deposits are famously hard to extract — is unlikely to have a serious economic impact. But Trump’s quasi-imperial ambition to establish a sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere will not make America great again. The key to greater US prosperity is competing in new technologies and addressing the problems in its domestic economy, not looting its neighbours for hydrocarbons it already has.
In that respect, the Venezuela gambit is an intervention from a lost age before the shale gas revolution, when the US was not just a net importer of energy but oriented much of its foreign policy around keeping the hydrocarbons flowing. In league with the UK, Washington overthrew the Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 after he nationalised British oil production. The hydrocarbon diplomacy of the 1970s following the economic shock of the Arab oil embargo of 1973 helped lead to the Carter Doctrine of 1980, which insisted the oil-rich Gulf be aligned to US interests.