Return of the White Man's Burden

For most of the twentieth-century, Venezuela was regarded by investors and speculators alike as the most important source of oil outside of the United States. The oil fields in the Maracaibo basin, for example, fueled the Allied campaigns of WWII. The oldest oil site in Lagunillas, located in the westernmost part of the country, was discovered in 1913, just before the outbreak of World War I. Current assessment suggests that this site has enough liquid in the tank to offer the world another fifty-two years of oil consumption (Crude Nation, p. 138). 

In 1954, Venezuela accounted for more than half the profits of Standard Oil company of New Jersey. Venezuela has since then fallen off the geopolitical map, losing contracts to the much more reliable and financially sound Middle East. Despite the world’s entirely rational reliance on the Gulf region for its petroleum needs, Venezuela remains the king of oil. Venezuela alone has 17% of the world’s proven oil reserves. That is more than 300 billion barrels trapped underground, making it the largest known reservoir of oil in the world, ahead of Saudi Arabia. Venezuela’s total oil capacity (estimated at 1.2T) is as much oil as humanity has ever consumed, and more than enough liquid to see humanity through for the next two centuries. Amazingly, the Cerro Negro field, located in the pirhana-infested Orinoco oil belt, has enough oil in store to last another 757 years (Crude Nation, p. 137). 

Venezuela arrived at its optimum output in the 1970s, when it pumped about 3.5M barrels of oil a day. By the late 1990s total production had stabilized to about 3.3M barrels a day. All of that changed when Hugo Chavez took over the nation’s political system, and with it, its oil system. Under the chavistas, oil production went from more than 3M barrels when Chavez entered office in 1999 to about 2.7M a day when he died in 2013. Nicholas Maduro, Chavez’s hand-picked successor, would further devastate the country’s oil-producing capacity by using oil companies as his personal piggybank. 

According to an analysis by JP Morgan Chase, the current level of oil output in Venezuela stands at a shocking 800,000 (0.8M) barrels per day. A country that was once the envy of the Latin world, one of the most sought-after landing spots for multinational corporations and Michelin chefs, was reduced over the course of three decades to a dilapidated fail-state that can barely compete with Angola’s daily oil output. Rebuilding Venezuela’s tattered, under-performing oil industry will likely cost an estimated $100B, and require lots of patient, hazardous, and grossly underpaid work by people who have been personally wounded and repelled by decades of dictatorial persecution and dysfunction. 

Financial analysts and geologists are not confident that the country can return to its peak, especially within the next few years, but that is exactly what the President of the United States—not one to impose limits on what he can achieve—has promised to do. The successful removal of the individual most responsible for the decimation of the oil industry, followed by an open invitation to re-invest in the supra-rich oil nation, is a signal that the U.S. wants first rights to Venezuela’s coveted oil reserves. The question is whether the industry can be whipped into shape to make this dream a reality. Trump did not hesitate to criticize the country’s failure to live up to its full economic potential. The oil industry in that country was a ‘‘a total bust,’’ Trump complained. For the longest time—longer than should have been tolerated—they were ‘‘pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping,’’ he added. Now, with the help of the U.S, the new leaders will be able to ‘‘fix the badly broken infrastructure’’ and ‘‘start making money for the country.’’ In the meantime, interim leaders will be ‘‘turning over’’ the country’s precious resources to the U.S, to ensure that the oil is being used to ‘‘benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States.’’

The idea that underdeveloped resources can be transferred to an established trust until the failing proprietors show themselves capable of responsibly managing the abundance which nature has provided has a tragic but enduring history. In Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest, William Easterly takes readers back to the beginnings of modernity and the search for unknown lands and their bountiful resources to plumb the origins of the ideology of dispossession. It was during this ‘age of discovery’ that various apologists for colonialism honed and perfected their arguments for the confiscation of native lands. Particularly pernicious was the idea that ‘‘it was lawful for the people who would improve the land, the English, to take the territory from those who had failed to improve it, the Indians, for the sake of global improvement’’ (Violent Saviors, p. 6). 

The most interesting defender of this ‘developmental right of conquest’ was none other than John Locke, a man deeply implicated in the politics of colonial America (Violent Saviors, p. 6). In his Two Treatises of Government, the English philosopher argued at length that failure to improve land could result in it falling in ‘‘the Possession of any other,’’(Two Treatises, II.38.8). In the case of the American Indian, his poor husbandry was to be remedied by the work of colonization. By educating the destitute native and tilling his land, John Winthrop and other colonial leaders entertained grand hopes that their Indian neighbors would learn how to ‘‘improve a part to more use than before they could do the whole’’(Violent Saviors, p. 6). By art and industry, the inhabitants of this new utopia ‘‘make the land sufficient for both which previously seemed poor and barren to the natives.’’ Both groups then merge into one merry people and ‘‘absorb the same way of life and the same customs, much to the great advantage of both’’(Utopia, p. 76).

At least that was the plan on paper. On the ground, the business of civilizational rescue was a much more bloody affair. The Englishman’s utopia was authoritarian and brutish by design. In the same passage in which Thomas More paints an idyllic picture of racial harmony, one in which Englishmen ‘‘join with themselves the natives,’’ there is also a warning that that ‘‘the inhabitants who refuse to live according to their laws, they drive from the territory which they carve out for themselves. If they resist, they wage war against them’’ (Utopia, p. 76). More explains that the casus belli is the native’s violation of the natural law against wastage. The pursuants of war ‘‘…consider it a most just cause for war when people which does not use its soil but keeps it idle and waste nevertheless forbids the use and possession of it to others who by rule of nature ought to be maintained by it’’ (Utopia, p. 76). It is an injustice, in other words, for natives to seek to prevent settlers from taking over unproductive lands.

In his section on property, Locke introduced the idea that ‘‘nothing was made by God for Man to spoil or destroy’’ (Two Treatises, II.31.11). If the ‘‘Fruit of his planting perished without gathering, and laying up,’’ if ‘‘they rotted, or the Venison petrified, before he could spend it,’’ then such a man stood condemned of violating a ‘‘common Law of Nature’’ against wastage. The ‘‘wild Indian’’ who observes the products of the earth go to waste, not only forfeits his right to them, but is ‘‘liable to be punished’’(Two Treatises, II.38.38). Such punitive expeditions became a regular occurrence when Indian tribes organized themselves to resist English encroachments on their ancestral lands. 

The most devoted ‘civilizers’ called for the most ‘unproductive’ and ‘meddlesome’ tribes to be ‘‘extirpated as savage and pernicious beasts’’ (Violent Saviors, p. 107). Short of wide-scale genocide, the most expedient way of getting rid of those who did not fit the new moral economy was to push them into areas of land reserved for the indigent, a process Thomas Malthus correctly described as ‘‘the right of exterminating, of driving into a corner where they must starve’’ (An Essay on the Principle of Population, p. 15). By the 1830s, the U.S. had entered what the historian Steven Hahn calls the age of expulsion (Illiberal America, p. 132). The most notorious event of this period was the ‘Trail of Tears,’ which featured the deportation of at least 12,000 Cherokees from their territory in the south-eastern United States to the land west of the Mississippi River. When asked how such a federal policy could be consistent with justice, defenders of Indian removal appealed once more to the ‘law of nature’: ‘‘Some moon struck moralists may whine about the injustice’’ of expelling destitute families from their homes, wrote an anonymous contributor to the Georgia Journal in late August 1825, but it was ‘‘philanthropic and just’’ for the white men of the region to ‘‘rescue the lands from a state of wilderness’’(Unworthy Republic, p. 27). 

By laying so much emphasis on the moral duty to take over unproductive lands, prominent defenders of the imperial project expounded an idea that would prove to be of enormous importance for ‘‘illiberal thought in the next four centuries’’ (Violent Saviors, p. 6). As the language of ‘conquest’ faded into the background, the vocabulary of ‘stewardship’ was introduced to legitimize foreign control of local resources. By the end of the First World War, western powers responded to global demands for a new world order based on the principle of ‘self-determination’ with the offer of trusteeship. Colonial inhabitants were deemed too socially disorganized and politically unfit to govern themselves. The architects of the League of Nations thought it essential to the development of humanity that people ‘‘not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world,’’ be placed under the tutelage of ‘‘advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position can best undertake’’ the job of transitioning the rest of mankind to full civilizational maturity (Rich World, Poor World, p. 19).

According to Sir Frederick Lugard, the colonial governor of Nigeria, European states entering this new age of empire were obliged to exercise a ‘sacred trust’ on behalf of people who were ‘‘so pathetically dependent on their guidance,’’ that they could not govern themselves. At stake was not just the good order of these societies, but the proper stewardship of the natural resources which were believed to be the source of the wealth of nations and the progress of humanity. Sugar, tea, coffee, and cacao, all ‘‘these products lay wasted and ungarnered in Africa because the natives did not know their use and value.’’ Lugard estimated that millions of tons of oil-nuts ‘‘grew wild without the labour of man, and lay rotting in the forests.’’ Given the tremendous dissipation of so many valuable resources, ‘‘who could deny the right of the hungry people of Europe to utilise the wasted bounties of nature?’’ Lugard asked. The task of developing these resources for the benefit of mankind now fell on the shoulders of white men, who were expected to act as ‘trustees’ of the world’s economic, political, moral, and even spiritual well-being. This ‘dual mandate,’ one cultural and the other economic, was an extension of a long-established principle of political control based on the natural right of more rational, industrious, and civilized philanthropists to seize the underdeveloped territories of ‘improvident’ people groups, and transform these patches of land into rich sources of sustenance and prosperity (Rich World, Poor World, p. 20). 

The fundamental problem with the developmental argument for conquest is that it assumes that expert technical knowledge (about agricultural techniques, food science, administration, or what have you) grants knowers not just authority over others, but the moral licence to coerce those deemed inferior in comportment, skill, and technical ability. When it came to matters of government and justice, Woodrow Wilson explained, ‘‘they [the Filipinos] are children and we are men’’ and as such ‘‘must obey’’ (Violent Saviors, p. 227). The error of this reasoning has a name: the ‘expert/boss’ fallacy. Simply because a person has gathered recognizable expertise on a subject, does not mean that this person now has the right to boss people around. Liberals contend that interpersonal relationships should be regulated by moral principles, not epistemic authority, and that command of political knowledge and/or technological craft should not be used to withhold political goods or to deny human rights to those deemed ‘less civilized’ for their lack of knowledge. It was not uncommon during the nineteenth century for political scientists to exempt entire continents from the rules that ordinarily govern the relations between states and individuals. The American intervention in the Philippines was a tragic display of the dangers of this kind of intellectual arrogance. Theodore Woolsey, a professor of international law at Yale University, asserted before colleagues gathered at an 1899 symposium on American foreign policy that political rights should be out of reach to Filipinos, ‘‘like edged tools rescued from children’s hands’’ (Violent Saviors, p. 194).

This paternal attitude has been a constant source of disrespect, discrimination, and disregard for the wants, desires, and interests of ‘less civilized’ nations. Adam Smith was one of the few liberal-minded philosophers of his generation to argue that the plunder, enslavement, and wasting of whole peoples to meet the passing taste of another could not be squared with any developed sense of justice. In his Wealth of Nations, Smith had occasion to condemn the ‘‘folly and injustice’’ which gave rise to the establishment of colonies in the new world (Wealth of Nations, p. 170). It was a matter of historical record, he noted, that these commercial hubs were founded upon violent exploitation. The ‘‘superiority of force’’ was so great on the side of the Europeans, Smith observed, that ‘‘they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remoter countries’’ (Wealth of Nations, p. 209). 

Smith developed the idea of an ‘impartial spectator’ to show that the violent seizure of native possessions was objectively wrong. We may conceive that an injury was done, Smith explains, when ‘‘an impartial spectator would be of opinion he was injured, would join with him in his concern and go along with him when he defend[ed] the subject in his possession against any violent attack, or used force to recover what had been thus wrongfully wrested out of his hands.’’ This response may be expected when a person who has laid claim to an item by an act of occupation is deprived of his just title (Lectures on Jurisprudence, I.38.37). 

It matters not whether the new owner has greater need for it or can do better with it than the prior owner. To disturb a man’s happiness ‘‘merely because it stands in the way of our own, to take from him what is of real use to him merely because it may be of equal or of more use to us, or to indulge, in this manner, at the expence of other people, the natural preference which every man has for his own happiness above that of other people, is what no impartial spectator can go along with.’’ When we try to ‘‘examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it,’’ it becomes easier to discern what other parties may take exception to (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 100, 133). 

That more powerful and technologically advanced nations see a ‘need’ to use the world’s resources to alleviate the demographic pressures of their society, to contribute to the progress of their civilization, or even to satisfy the expensive appetite of their consumer class, cannot license the destruction of innocent lives. There are, Smith argues, moral limits on our ambitions, which if violated will naturally stir the resentment of the victimized and the indignation of those who witness this injustice. It is a ‘savage policy,’ for example, to burn down healthy clove and nutmeg trees because one sees no immediate use for them beyond putting the extracted quantities to market. The ruinous policy not only destroys the land, but reduces entire populations to starvation. Such ‘‘arts of oppression,’’ as were practiced by the Dutch companies, cannot be tolerated by an impartial judge (The Wealth of Nations, p. 220-221). 

While industry and the pursuit of material improvement can be a driver of human progress, in the race for wealth, honors, and preferment, the entrepreneur ‘‘may run as hard as he can, and strain every nerve and muscle, in order to outstrip all his competitors,’’ but ‘‘if he should justle, or throw down any of them, the indulgence of the spectator is entirely at an end.’’ For such mischief ‘‘is a violation of fair play, which’’ persons impartial cannot admit (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 101). Breach of property was a particularly high offense in Smith’s moral system. ‘‘The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property,’’ Smith explained, ‘‘is the most sacred and inviolable’’ (The Wealth of Nations, p. 225). ‘‘To be deprived of that which we are possessed of,’’ he continued, ‘‘is of a greater evil than to be disappointed of what we have only the expectation.’’ Hence why ‘‘the most sacred laws of justice’’ seem ‘‘to call loudest for vengeance and punishment’’ on infractions of personal rights, including property and possessions (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 101-102). 

The best insurance against moral infamy, both in the world of commerce and politics, says Smith, is complete obeisance to the most basic principles of natural liberty. The most excellent and practicable of those principles stipulates that ‘‘every man, so long as he does not violate the laws of justice’’ should be ‘‘left perfectly free to pursue his own interests his own way.’’ If any ‘‘one sentence launched the ideology known as liberalism,’’ writes Easterly, ‘‘it was this one’’ (Violent Saviors, p. 274). Later liberal figures such Ludwig Von Mises would succeed where earlier liberals such as John Stuart Mill had failed to apply this principle with consistency to the issue of foreign conquest. In his Liberalism, written during the rise of the Nazis, Mises condemned the ‘age of discovery’ for its shameless cruelty. ‘‘No chapter is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism,’’ he lamented. ‘‘Blood was shed uselessly and senselessly. Foreign lands were laid waste; whole people destroyed and eliminated. All this can in no way be extenuated or justified.’’ Given this appalling record of wrong, Mises was of the opinion that the only suitable response was to agitate ‘‘for the complete liberation of the colonies from the despotic rule under which they live today’’ (Liberalism, p. 124).

While large empires of conquests are no more, attempts by one country to take over the ‘wasted’ resources of another remain appealing. One may perhaps celebrate the fact that among liberal democratic nations, explicit force against foreign civilians can no longer be publicly justified by appeal to a so-called right of conquest, but so long as politicians believe that they have a duty to ensure that valuable resources do not go to waste, the door will remain open to all manner of treachery and injustice. 

Featured image is PDVSA Moron, by Hugo Londoño