The proposed paper would take the same expansive perspective on decolonisation as the Boumedienne regime of the early 1970s which, even a decade after Algeria’s ‘nominal’ independence from France, pursued a global struggle to rid the Third World of economic and political ‘neo-imperialism’. At this point, the Algerian state’s socialist modernising ambitions were reaching their apex, fuelled by mounting oil and gas revenues. In the international domain, the Algerians took a leading role in the campaign to restructure the global economy to the benefit of the developing countries, and also had the confidence to abet openly a wide variety of dissident and revolutionary groups. Across the Atlantic, American foreign policy was going through a profound transformation under the stewardship of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, whose first instinct was to retreat from their liberal predecessors’ efforts to steer the modernisation of the developing world, and to focus instead on more hard-headed calculations of America’s strategic interests in the Southern Hemisphere. Indeed, the Realpolitik approach seemed appropriate for an era of flagging national confidence, beset as the United States were by domestic discontent, the war in Vietnam, and economic crisis. But no event more encapsulated the contrasting fortunes of the American dream and its radical Third Worldist counterpart than the oil embargo imposed by the Arab states in late 1973. Now the West, too, knew scarcity and impotency. Uncannily echoing the concerns of French leaders faced with the demise of empire in the 1950s, American officials bemoaned the collapse of the international economic system that they had dominated for three decades, and the arrival of this ominous new era of ‘interdependence’. The paper would rely principally on archives in Algeria and the US, including the Algerian foreign ministry archives, State Department archives and Nixon Presidential Papers, in order to ask, to what extent was America actually a reluctant empire in the early 1970s? Was the growing American economic engagement in the Third World not the result of ideological compunction and capitalist expansionism, but due instead to the combination of domestic weakness, a Marxist offensive in Africa, and misplaced confidence on the part of countries like Algeria? How flexible was the Algerian socialist development model, and to what extent were Algerian efforts to reconcile the socialist revolution with Western commerce a continuation of the negotiated conclusion to the colonial era? How valid, ultimately, was the Third Worldist concept of ‘neo-imperialism’?