US’ Venezuela raid shows geopolitics is now a contest between economic blocs

The latest developments in Venezuela are interpreted as part of a broader US strategy to secure access to major oil resources. They are much more than that: the US raid signals a transformation in the global economy wherein a country’s power is increasingly determined not by its political actions, but by its capacity to embed resource wealth within a self-sustaining production system.

These deeper processes did not begin today, but rather around 2008-2009 when, according to an integrated national power index developed by the Russian Academy of Sciences, China overtook the United States as the world’s leading power, a gap that has widened since.

Venezuela ranks among the world’s top countries in terms of natural resources. Militarily, it sits somewhere in the middle of global rankings – its military component is ranked 32nd out of 193 countries in the academy’s index – sufficient for domestic control but inadequate for deterring external pressure. Economically, however, its position is close to the bottom, as its economic system has proved unable to convert its resource wealth into sustainable economic power.

The national power assessments also suggest only two fully fledged systemic cores have effectively formed in today’s world: China and the US. In both, resources, the economy, finance, technology, human capital and military capacity are combined into relatively self-sustaining systems.

Over the past decade and a half, the gradual shift in the global balance of power has encouraged the US to try and reconnect external resource nodes to its system – including Venezuela as a resource base, Greenland as both a resource and logistical hub, and Canada as a source of resources and territory.

The aim is to rebalance resource constraints and strengthen the overall components of national power to compete once again for leadership, this time at the level of a macroeconomic region. In essence, the 21st century is increasingly defined not by competition between states, but between macroeconomic regions.

South China Morning Post