Say you’re a declining empire. Your currency has lost 95% of its purchasing power over the last century. Your debt is compounding faster than your economy is growing. The foreigners who used to fund your deficits are quietly rotating out of your bonds and into bullion. And the tribute system that pays for your aircraft carriers, your entitlement programs, and your bread and circuses is starting to wobble.
What do you do?
You go find some gold.
That’s what Rome did in AD 101. And that’s what Washington is doing in Caracas right now.
Felicity Bradstock at OilPrice.com reports:
U.S. Moves to Secure Venezuela’s Gold as Influence Deepens After Intervention
“Since the United States intervention in Venezuela on January 3rd, which effectively brought an end to President Nicolás Maduro’s 13-year dictatorship, the Trump administration has had a heavy hand in Venezuelan politics… The U.S. has also staked its claim to vast quantities of Venezuelan crude. However, oil is not the only resource that the U.S. has shown an interest in, as the Trump administration imports millions of dollars’ worth of gold from the South American country…
On March 25th, the U.S. Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, said that the U.S. had recently brought back $100 million of gold from Venezuela. “There hadn’t been a shipment of precious metals between Venezuela and America in over 20 years,” Burgum stated during a CERAWeek conference in Houston.
President Trump has said that Venezuela’s oil resources were stolen from the U.S.… suggesting that the U.S. has the right to dominate the South American country’s oil business.”
What happened in Dacia
For readers who haven’t been tracking this closely, the Trump administration invaded Venezuela in January, installed an interim president named Delcy Rodriguez (previously Maduro’s own VP — yes, really), and has since been loading up planes with gold bars and signing extraction contracts with U.S. mining companies. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, the guy who runs our national parks, spent two days in Caracas in March negotiating gold shipments and mineral rights on behalf of roughly 20 American companies. The justification, per Trump, is that Venezuelan oil was “stolen from the U.S.” back in 2007, so we’re just taking back what’s ours.
What was signed wasn’t foreign policy. Those are looting contracts.
And there’s a direct historical analog. In AD 101, the Emperor Trajan crossed the Danube with tens of thousands of legionaries and invaded Dacia — what’s now Romania. Rome at the time was exactly where the U.S. is now: militarily dominant, fiscally exhausted, with a currency the Senate had been quietly clipping for half a century. Trajan needed hard assets. Dacia had the richest gold and silver mines in the known world. The pretext was that the Dacian king was misusing Roman “subsidies” and posed a security threat. (Substitute “sanctions evasion” and “regional destabilization” and you’ve got the 2026 State Department brief verbatim.)
Two campaigns, five years, and one riverbed treasure betrayal later, Trajan hauled back an estimated 165 tonnes of gold and 330 tonnes of silver, possibly the largest single plunder in ancient history, plus ongoing mine production estimated at 700 million denarii per year. He used the loot to build his Forum, erect his Column, and throw 123 days of gladiatorial games. Roman chroniclers couldn’t stop bragging about it. The empire was back.
Except it wasn’t. Trajan’s successor Hadrian immediately halted all further expansion. Why? Because the math had flipped. The periphery had become more expensive to hold than it was worth. Dacia was the last major territory Rome ever conquered. Everything after that was rearguard action. The denarius kept getting debased. The barbarians kept massing at the frontier. Rome had another 370 years to run, but the direction of travel was set the day Trajan died with no new mines to conquer.
All Dacia did was postpone the reckoning by one emperor’s lifetime.
The pattern is the same
Here’s the piece that most foreign policy analysts still miss. Growing empires produce. They build, they trade, they invent. Tribute from the periphery is a nice bonus on top of a productive core. Declining empires extract. They seize hard assets from weaker neighbors because their own productive base has hollowed out and their currency is no longer trusted to settle accounts.
The tell is always the same: the money is failing at home, so the state goes abroad for something real.
Quick tour of the last twenty-five years:
- Iraq, 2003 — invaded after Saddam announced he’d price Iraqi oil in euros.
- Libya, 2011 — “liberated” after Gaddafi started pushing a gold-backed African dinar.
- Ukraine, 2024-2025 — “reconstruction” deals structured as mineral rights.
- Greenland and the Congo — the rare earth scramble nobody wants to call colonialism.
- Venezuela, 2026 — oil, gold, coltan, thorium.
Every single one is a country with something real being “stabilized” by a country with nothing but IOUs.
Why now
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to connect the dots. Central banks bought a record amount of gold in 2024 and again in 2025. The BRICS payment system is settling a growing share of global trade outside the dollar. Foreign ownership of U.S. Treasuries as a percentage of outstanding debt has been falling for a decade. The dollar’s share of global reserves has dropped from 72% in 2000 to under 55% today and still sinking.
The Treasury can print dollars. It cannot print gold. That’s why Burgum is on a plane.
Three paths, one destination
The pattern from here is almost mechanical:
- The Venezuela play works. Washington locks in a steady flow of gold, oil, and rare earths. Empire buys itself another decade. Gold keeps rising anyway, because nothing about the underlying debt dynamics has changed, we’re just putting hard assets on the Fed’s balance sheet a little faster than we’re printing claims against them.
- The Venezuela play fails. Insurgency, quagmire, Russian or Chinese counter-moves. Costs exceed loot. Dollar credibility takes another hit. Gold rips.
- Other powers run the same play. China secures Africa and Central Asia. Russia consolidates the Arctic. Resource blocs harden. Commodity prices go vertical. Gold rips.
All roads, as usual, lead to the same asset allocation. Only the timing varies.
The landing
Rome sent Trajan to Dacia because it was easier than fixing the denarius. Washington is sending Burgum to Caracas because it’s easier than fixing the dollar.
The gold always ends up in the same place… with whoever is strong enough to take it and smart enough to hold it.
Right now that’s the United States.
It won’t be forever.
