On Monday, the Stop the War Coalition (StWC), the environmentalist group Just Stop Oil (JSO), the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG), which is a group of ‘Corbynite’ MPs, and Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project, held a joint press conference. With differences in emphasis, they all strongly condemned the moves of Venezuela’s dictator-president Nicolas Maduro to annex the Essequibo region of neighbouring Guyana.

‘The last thing the world needs right now is another imperialist war for oil’, a StWC spokesman said. JSO were particularly dismayed by Maduro’s announcement that he would immediately ‘grant operating licenses for the exploration and exploitation of oil, gas and mines in the entire area of our Essequibo’. The SCG said they felt compelled to speak out, because Maduro continued to insist on calling himself a ‘socialist’, a label which, according to the SCG, he had forfeited any right to use.

The press conference was followed by a ‘Solidarity with Guyana’ march from Parliament Square to the Venezuelan embassy, where activists waved Guyana flags, and held up banners condemning Maduro.

You have probably guessed by now that none of this happened. I just made it up. There was, of course, no press conference, no ‘solidarity march’, or any other kind of condemnation of Maduro’s ‘Greater Venezuela’ plans from Britain’s socialists.

But why not? These types are usually not shy to take sides in foreign policy conflicts, and this one has all the hallmarks of the kind of conflict they normally get excited about.

Last Sunday, Maduro held a referendum on the question of whether Venezuela should annex Essequibo. Only about one in ten potential voters bothered to turn up, but among this small ‘selectorate’, almost everyone said yes. Maduro proceeded to distribute new maps of Venezuela, which include Essequibo, and more importantly, he ramped up military presence at the border.

Granted, the border dispute did not start with Maduro. In theory, Venezuela has always been laying claim to Essequibo. But this dispute had been dormant for decades before Maduro chose to rekindle it. Even Maduro’s predecessor and political idol Hugo Chavez, who was fond of mixing his socialist rhetoric with fervent nationalism, never showed much interest in the region. Nor did Maduro himself, in his previous role as Chavez’s Foreign Minister.

So why now, all of a sudden?

When western governments or their allies are involved in foreign policy conflicts, western progressives are usually quick to suspect economic motives behind it. This stems not just from a general distrust of western governments, and Britain and America in particular. It is also an application of Lenin’s idea that ‘imperialism’ is ‘the highest stage of capitalism’.

Guyana is experiencing the one thing which has become a distant memory in Venezuela: economic growth

Although I tend to lean towards non-interventionism on foreign policy, I have always been sceptical of such claims. Regimes that are politically hostile to the West are usually quite happy to sell their oil, or whatever resources they may possess, to the West anyway.

In the case of Venezuela, however, the economic motive is unusually clear-cut. It looks nothing like a typical border dispute. It involves no national minority on the ‘wrong’ side of the border, and no landmarks of symbolic importance to Venezuela’s national story. Essequibo is a sparsely populated region, and its inhabitants – who are far more likely to speak English or an English-based creole language than Spanish – have no particular connection to Venezuela. The only thing that changed in recent years is that new oil reserves were discovered, and that, as a result, Guyana is experiencing the one thing which has become a distant memory in Venezuela: economic growth.

Western socialists would no doubt retort that what happens in Venezuela is none of their business, and that asking them to condemn Maduro is a bad-faith argument. They are wrong. It very much is their business. They made it their business when they made Venezuela their poster child of the ‘Socialism of the 21st Century’. From the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, Venezuela was regularly held up as a shining example of a new model of socialism. Everyone on the anti-capitalist Left was at it.

Yet when the Venezuelan economy collapsed, its western admirers simply fell silent. Astonishingly, they managed to get away with it.