From the slumber and brain-fog babalas of Christmas parties, imigidi and all manner of other celebrations, we were rudely awakened by the stage-managed ouster of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. It was a moment fused with all the symbolic and realpolitik significance of the kind of world we now live in.
“In the womb of the blotting war-cloud”, as Rudyard Kipling may have described it. A world uncertain and prone to rapid escalation of differences and divisions into the use of force. Accompanied by the usual monikers and means of exchange — oil, debt and breaches of sovereignty for occupation or annexation.
The US action presents a shift in the increasingly rapid weaponisation of economic interdependence. Venezuela holds the world’s largest known reserves of crude. Yet the oil theory of the conflict may be stretched a bit too far.
Certainly a struggle for spheres of influence over raw material extraction lies at the centre of the conflict. Yet there are things about this episode that have nothing to do with oil.
Collaboration and conflict
A few other complementary but revealing considerations lie behind the military blockade and the complicated multilateral response it has elicited, precisely because of the nature of collaboration and conflict between multinational firms and the state in raw material exporting nations.
As the late journalist and activist Ruth First observed in the case of Libya, its integration into the world marketing system for oil (Opec) not only influenced its production and export rates but also its political economy. State and private sector relations were characterised by “a blazing hostility and a running quarrel over the pickings”.
This unfolded along with “a mutual dependence on oil and the cartel monopoly marketing structure”, from which continued profits, an expanding social wage and a constantly expanding public sector relied. Venezuela is similarly complicated.
In a world whose technological and production structure is changing, and wherein Caracas holds a relatively small share of total US or Chinese oil imports, the historical analogy is of illustrative value, but we are not in 1973.
American economic interests may also rest in the link between securing political control over Caracas and the key financial and exchange-related benefits of doing so.
The chokehold of any one oil cartel member is complicated by how diverse the supply sources for oil to China and America are. China, which accounts for over 80% of Caracas’ exports, has other suppliers. Venezuelan oil accounts for less than 5% of Chinese total crude imports and 1% of total crude imports into the US.
American economic interests may also rest in the link between securing political control over Caracas and the key financial and exchange-related benefits of doing so. For not only the needs of “energy-intensive” producers, but also the highly service-based and financialised economy existing in the US.
This makes for a different form of annexation, one that should be seen in financial rather than production terms as a key matter of interest. Not too dissimilar to the $20bn gamble by US President Donald Trump in November last year that gave Argentina’s President Javier Milei a lifeline to escape a politically disastrous currency crisis.
There is a praxis emerging in America’s engagement with its neighbours — the use of any plausible pretext, whether ideological or rule-enforcing, to expand the territorial span of its influence and authority.
When Venezuelan debt stands at nearly double its national output, its foreign exchange reserves are only able to cover a declining period of import requirements and other economic signals of difficulty, and it is made vulnerable to ideological “conversion” and perniciously deeper extraction of financial value.
This is through tied investment, debt reorganisation and other forms of financialisation. It is, one suspects, more a rentier type of debt-fuelled asset stripping than a cavalier imperialist search for oil.
The war cloud Kipling feared, which the Americas may soon resemble, and the warmongering of his prose could not deny that a lasting and meaningful peace will also require those “tempered and taught to the end”.
Taught to observe beyond the seemingly apparent and tempered in their disposition to difference and change.
• Cawe is chief commissioner at the International Trade Administration Commission. He writes in his personal capacity.
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