From Zimbabwe to Venezuela, US economic coercion and imperial plunder of Third World countries remain business as usual.
Since the bipartite
US-Israeli attack on Iran began two months ago,
US President
Donald Trump has made declarations about
stealing Iranian oil: "If it were up to me, I'd take the oil, I'd keep the oil, it would bring plenty of money." Failing that, he has
threatened to destroy Iran's oil infrastructure.
Hoping for a repeat performance of the
kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and the
Venezuelan oil theft, Trump's triumphalist rhetoric turned out to be premature.
Iranian officials responded to Trump's threats by reminding him several times that Iran is not
Venezuela: "We tell the Americans clearly: this is not Venezuela, where you can loot resources," and that the Islamic Republic and the Iranian nation "will stand firmly against such attempts".
If the Americans and the British were able to
pillage Iranian oil after overthrowing Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who nationalised it in 1953, the possibility of a repeat performance today seems much less likely.
The US pillage of Third World resources is hardly a new development.
It has continued US imperialist policies since the Second World War, and long predates it in the case of US theft of
Latin America's resources, let alone those of Native Americans within the US itself.
In 1952, the US voted against a UN General Assembly resolution declaring self-determination a human right.
Indeed, the US and the former European colonial empires stood firm after the war and the onset of the age of decolonization, insisting that the end of European and American direct colonialism did not entail granting economic sovereignty to the countries undergoing decolonization.
This is something former Ghanaian President
Kwame Nkrumah understood well when he explained that granting political independence to formerly colonized countries, while maintaining the same colonial global economic structure of pillaging Third World resources, changed very little in the economic lives of the colonized and ultimately denied them economic sovereignty and substantive independence.
Postcolonial challenge
The first major collective challenge by formerly colonized countries took place in 1955 at the Afro-Asian Bandung Conference in Indonesia. The conference asserted the right to self-determination of still-colonized countries and peoples, as well as those that had just won independence.
What transpired at Bandung was a reversal of the hegemony of western insistence on economic pillage.
Asian and African countries had, in fact, been fighting for the inclusion of political and economic self-determination at the United Nations since the end of the Second World War.
A few months after Bandung, in November 1955, the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly had already agreed to the formulation of the right to self-determination for adoption in the 1960 resolution and the 1966 UN covenants.
Debates in the Third Committee had been raging since 1950, with colonizing countries insisting on a
colonial exemption clause in the future resolution.
The imperialist countries were vehemently opposed by Asian and African delegates, prominent among them
Arab delegates from
Syria,
Iraq and
Saudi Arabia, among others, who played a crucial role in defeating the colonial clause and in pushing for self-determination as a human right.
This came after much agitation and opposition by the US and American corporations to any whiff of economic self-determination at the UN, insisting that the right only encompassed political self-determination.
US corporations went apoplectic when Guatemala's President Jacobo Arbenz introduced land reform measures that threatened US businesses and referenced a 1952 UN General Assembly resolution supporting nationalisation of economic resources.
Chile, like the rest of Latin America, economically dominated by the imperialist US, sought during the same year to amend the draft
human rights covenants to state that the "right of people to self-determination included the economic right to control all of their natural resources and not to be deprived of their use or their means of existence by the actions of any outside power".
The Americans were so appalled by the moves to establish economic independence that they called the Soviet and Third World attempts to institutionalise economic self-determination for independent states a form of "
hate language".
By 1962, UN General Assembly resolution 1803 endorsed permanent sovereignty over natural resources in a move to affirm economic self-determination.
But that did not stop the US, which sponsored coups to overthrow leaders committed to pursuing economic sovereignty and removed them from power - including
Syria's Shukri al-Quwwatli in 1949;
Mosaddegh in 1953; Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz in 1954; Congo's Patrice Lumumba in 1961; Brazil's Joao Goulart in 1964; Indonesia's Ahmad Sukarno in 1965; and Ghana's Nkrumah in 1966 - to name the most prominent.
Gamal Abdel Nasser was targeted by the Europeans and
Israel in a tripartite invasion in 1956 after he nationalised the Suez Canal Company, and by Israel and the US in 1967 to end the
Egyptian welfare state and Nasser's experiment in asserting economic sovereignty.
Despite these defeats, the formerly colonised continued to seek ways to reassert their economic sovereignty against the imperialist economic order.
The last collective attempt was made in the 1970s, while the world was on the verge of being taken over by economic neoliberalism and "globalisation" - namely the project of a New International Economic Order (NIEO).
The NIEO was a set of proposals made by Third World countries through the UN Conference on Trade and Development, established in 1964 by formerly colonised countries as well as imperialised Latin American countries and headed by Argentinian economist Raul Prebisch, to promote economic "equality" and remedy economic "injustices" among states to accelerate "economic and social development". It came to nought.
Indeed, the US veto on the liberation of the peoples of southern
Africa from apartheid and settler-colonialism - Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, Namibia, South Africa - continued until guarantees were given that the US and its European imperialist allies and the white settlers would maintain economic sovereignty over these countries after "independence".
It was also Kissinger who was the architect of the
"tar baby" option of strengthening US ties with the white supremacist settler-colonies in South Africa, Rhodesia, and the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola.
In the infamous and illustrative case of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, this economic arrangement persisted for almost two decades after independence in 1980.
Neoliberal coercion
By 1990, 100,000 white settlers remained in Zimbabwe. Control of the commercial private sector remained in white hands. The opulent suburbs remained exclusively white while Africans lived in overcrowded townships. The white settlers maintained their superiority and their economic and, essentially, their political privileges.
The refusal of the
UK or the Americans to subsidise the purchase of white land increased land hunger and economic frustration.
When the moratorium on nationalisation of white property ran out in 1990, President
Robert Mugabe was advised not to frighten the neighbouring whites in South Africa, especially after the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 and negotiations underway to end apartheid while maintaining imperialist and white sovereignty over South Africa's national resources.
