{"text":[[{"start":8.83,"text":"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. "}],[{"start":37.93,"text":"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. "}],[{"start":72.91,"text":"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."}],[{"start":122.8,"text":"As Karthik Sankaran of the Quincy Institute points out in an incisive piece, fossil fuel imperialism should have had its day after shale extraction made the US a net energy exporter at the end of the 2010s. In trying to press US oil companies into investment and production in Venezuela, Trump is treating them like the state-owned companies typical of oil-dependent countries elsewhere, used as geopolitical and fiscal tools."}],[{"start":154.49,"text":"To what economic end? At the margin, even assuming the efficiency of production increases to bring the current cost of extraction in Venezuela down from around $80 a barrel, well above the current world price, its oil will displace the US shale, which genuinely does deliver American energy dominance. It will also make US energy supply subject to the vagaries of Latin American politics. "}],[{"start":185.03,"text":"Trump’s broader aims, as suggested in December’s national security strategy, are to use coercion to secure the supply of commodities for America. But not only does the US have the misfortune to be in a not particularly ideal neighbourhood in that regard, making the country’s economy safe and prosperous will require improved technology more than the minerals delivered by quasi-imperial satraps."}],[{"start":214.81,"text":"It’s certainly true that there are some useful minerals in Latin America, notably lithium in Bolivia and some rare earths in Venezuela itself as well as in Brazil and Argentina. But the global price of lithium has collapsed in recent years as the inexorable grind of market forces has increased production elsewhere. The US’s vulnerability to rare earth restrictions from China derives mainly from its failure to develop refining processes."}],[{"start":247.59,"text":"It’s not a lack of basic commodities that’s holding back the US economy. America is falling behind China in innovation in productivity-enhancing technologies such as batteries, robotics and renewable energy — though to be fair, the sometimes reprehensible services offered by its tech sector remain world-beating. Trump’s growth strategy appears to rely on an AI sector that looks exceedingly like a bubble, fossil fuels with which the world is currently amply supplied and a pointless attempt to reshore basic manufacturing through tariffs."}],[{"start":286.28,"text":"Like the US in decades past, China also continues to face a massive energy import bill. But part of its response has been to drive forward renewable technologies at an incredible speed, a race the US has in effect conceded. "}],[{"start":304.51,"text":"In one area where America has maintained a lead — semiconductor research and development — Trump is allowing companies to help China keep up, for example by permitting Nvidia to export high-end chips there. If China is emboldened even at the margin by Trump’s Venezuela misadventure to seize Taiwan, it will take control of a huge swath of the world’s chip research and production capacity. As imperial plunder goes, an unassailable position in the technology that networks the world economy is worth more than some sticky oil deposits hundreds of metres underground."}],[{"start":346.96,"text":"One of the reasons that the Spanish empire imploded so quickly, certainly compared with its British counterpart, is that it was run by a corrupt, self-enriching aristocratic elite more concerned with grabbing wealth and power than in developing technologies and building trade routes."}],[{"start":365.45,"text":"Trumpists may pride themselves on acting decisively in US interests — international law and foreign policy alliances be damned — but building a sphere of geopolitical influence that delivers no discernible economic gains is emphatically not the way to do it."}],[{"start":395.26,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1767946561_3649.mp3"}