With its focus on Algeria’s oil and natural gas industries, this paper asks why that country epitomized the rise and fall of the global “Third Worldist” project to transform the world’s political and economic structures for the benefit of developing countries. After achieving its independence in 1962, Algeria pursued a revolutionary strategy to take control of its energy resources and harness them as drivers of a broader-based socialist development program. Over the next decade, its leaders diluted France’s dominant position in that sector by forging new commercial and technological relationships with Britain, Italy, and the United States. In the late 1960s, Algiers brokered pioneering deals with America’s Getty Oil and El Paso Gas, deals that reversed the traditional balance of power between a developing country and Western multinationals. In 1971, the Algerians nationalized their oil and gas holdings and imposed unilateral price rises on France—an action that French President Georges Pompidou compared to a “Hitlerian diktat”. Throughout this period, Algeria held up this strategy as an example to other developing countries in terms of both economic and political development. Then in 1973, mere weeks after Algeria had used its status as host of the Non-Aligned Summit to press its philosophy further, OPEC’s oil embargo and subsequent massive price increases seemed to provide the most emphatic vindication of the Third Worldist strategy. Yet, the fall was swift. By the 1980s Algeria was the epitome of Third World decline by dint of its economic collapse and rising political unrest. Relying principally on new documentary evidence from the archives of the Algerian state—including those of the Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Industry and Power—this paper argues that Algeria’s supposedly Third Worldist strategy contained a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, as an expression of economic nationalism, Third Worldism was intended to reinforce state power against the strengthening forces of “globalization”—namely, Western multinationals. Yet, by encouraging the decentralization and diversification of the global oil and gas economy, Algeria’s energy strategy actually epitomized the incipient processes of globalization that proved so fatal to the long-term economic goals of the Non-Aligned Movement and the G77 countries. Presaging the prevailing discourse of the 1990s, President Houari Boumedienne’s assertion in the early 1970s that Algeria had become a “non-ideological” country was, perhaps, the inadvertent admission of a revolutionary nationalism that had lost its way.