Brazil in the context of resource wars: The case of oil

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the strategies, actions, disputes and conflicts of the USA in search of oil, especially after the Second World War, configuring its geopolitics, and its effects for the recent evolution of the oil industry in Brazil. In this sense, it starts from the concept of the geopolitical economy of resource wars, a fundamental characteristic of modern geopolitics, an international order marked by conflicts and disputes between different international and domestic actors searching for the main strategic natural resources on the planet, facing a scenario of scarcity, environmental degradation, expansion of the capitalist economy and hegemonic disputes. Thus, a literature review on this subject was carried out, highlighting the main historical events and economic and geopolitical actions in the USA associated with the concept of resource wars. The work concludes that (i) USA has always played a role in relation to the oil industry based on a logic of disputes and conflicts, both in the economic and in the geopolitical fields, with the objective of asserting its supremacy and that of its national companies; and (ii) the geopolitical reaction of the USA to the change in Brazil's level of the volume of reserves, productive capacity and legal framework (sharing model in the Dilma Rousseff government, defining Petrobras as the exclusive operator), put Brazil on the horizon of oil resource war.