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Well actually we never left this state of things.
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Thanks for the correction, I should have checked.
To some degree, perhaps? I could be persuaded of that point… just not that this point is time is somehow less chaotic than other times… the process of building and rebuilding large scale societies, be those old-style empires or more recent globalized capitalist system, were always messy, contradictory, and incomplete projects always in the making.
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I think the relative peace and prosperity that Western powers enjoyed in the post-war era had at least as much to do with who won the war and how they chose to use their new military and economic influence for their own best interests than it had to do with everyone learning the importance of being nice to each other.
If you were an average citizen in certain Central American countries you likely would have experienced more violence and economic strife in the decades following WWII than during the war itself.
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I aggree with you.
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I guess it is too late for Venezuela to sit down with Guyana, and offer a deal?
“You have an area rich in resources, but do not have the capital to exploit it without going heavily into debt or giving the resource companies a huge slice. How about if we invest in a partnership to exploit the resources, allow Venezuelan workers to participate. The territory remains yours, we both get a healthy slice of a new pie, and most of the money stays in the region.”
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And everybody wins until the emissions from using said resources makes the whole area uninhabitable, the end. 
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There’s a terrific section in Daniel Bergen’s history of the oil industry ‘The Prize’ about how the US government decided access to Saudi oil was critical to America’s future.
Standard Oil of California (SoCal - now Chevron) and Texaco had run a concession to explore for oil in Saudi Arabia since 1933. California-Arabian Standard Oil struck big at Dharan in the late 1930s and all the indications were that there was an ocean of oil under the desert.
At the time, the British were the predominant players in the Persian Gulf, already controlling massive fields in the protectorate of Iraq and what was then Persia. There was a high likelihood that the British-owned Iraq Petroleum Company would try to get drilling rights in Saudi Arabia.
So in 1943, in the middle of the war, FDR entertained King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud on the USS Quincy in the Red Sea. In part, this secret meeting was driven by overblown worries that domestic reserves wouldn’t last; but also in good part to lock the British out of Saudi Arabia.
FDR charmed the Saudis - he gave the elderly king one of his wheelchairs and a DC-3 plane - he even gave up cigarettes and alcohol for the duration of the meeting. Ibn Saud did everything the US wanted; a monopoly on Saudi oil production and a pipeline from the Saudi fields to the Mediterranean and the formation. Arabian American Oil Co. was founded in 1944 and its been printing money ever since.
Meanwhile the UK was also drilling for oil in Kuwait - it never found a single find - which seems almost incredible.
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Such an arrangement would require quite a bit of mutual trust between the two governments. Not sure it would be wise for Guyana to accept such an offer from a country that just stated an intention to carry out a military invasion.
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Is that proposed deal (even aside from the discomfort of making it with someone who has announced intentions to invade) really any better for Guyana than the competing ones? Even if PDVSA has the necessary capability(somewhat unclear given their struggles with declining production and not having done any significant development in the last couple of decades; along with their own interest in joint ventures and assorted foreign specialists and equipment); any deal is going to be an exchange of some amount of the proceeds for the capital and expertise required to do the drilling; and it’s not obvious that Venezuela would either be interested in lower margins or have more favorable costs than others.
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Oh yeah, now it’s too late.
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Resources are important, but Guyana haven’t produced a really good cricketer since Shivnarine Chanderpaul, so I don’t think Venezuela will get much out of invading.
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The post-war economic anomaly of general prosperity in the West is over, I’ll agree. The threats of increasing economic inequality, resurgent fascism, and the climate emergency loom. Future generations will live in a very different world than the one those of us over the age of 45 became accustomed to.
Geopolitical chaos, though, is not inevitable. What Gibson called “The Jackpot” is a collective choice. And even though most of us here would agree that the established powers that be aren’t moving with appropriate urgency against the threats described above, they’re not doing nothing either. It’s why the major NATO countries have been supporting Ukraine, even if ones like Hungary are not. It’s why we have climate conferences, even if COP28 in the UAE was a farce. It’s why Maduro will be strongly dissuaded from enforcing this claim by the U.S., even if we question the underpinnings of the rules-based international order.
The most important thing we can do right now in the West is make sure that those politicians who call for isolationism, for appeasement of expansionist despots, for denial of global warming, for xenophobia, and for economic policies that make the rich richer and the poor more miserable are not allowed to take power and take us back to the rougher pre-1945 world they think of as a paradise.
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… FWIW it’s not like the status quo in Guyana never involved any foreign interventions
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It is in the nature of the hypocritical entity to offer a comment. That’s what hypocrites do.
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So the Biden administration should just stay quiet here?
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If they do remain silent, it will be a great victory for the forces of honest men, and Guyana’s predictable loss can be later be rationalized as a necessary sacrifice in the quest for a more decent society /s
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… no need to worry about that
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