Why didn't the United States exploit oil after Iraq?

Because of the oil economy, the United States has a lot of oil, but most of it is not mined or a small amount is mined as a strategic reserve, which indirectly affects the origin of oil and consolidates the status of the US dollar as the world settlement currency. China was restrained by various means to get oil from the Middle East and had to import a lot of Russian oil.

What the United States needs is to maintain petrodollars and prevent Saddam from selling oil in euros.

As long as oil is always traded in dollars internationally, any country (such as China, Japan and Germany) must pay for oil in dollars and reserve a large amount of dollars.

The United States can use its own dollars to grab the fruits of the world's economic development. The United States can let countries around the world help it bear the fiscal deficit, let workers around the world help it raise a huge army, and then use this army to safeguard its dollar hegemony, so that it can unify the rivers and lakes for generations to come!

This is a real big deal, and robbing oil is nothing compared with this (and I seriously doubt that if the United States really organizes manpower to rob oil, I am afraid that the oil robbed is not enough to pay wages).

Besides, during the Vietnam War, the US government had already overdrawn. After the decoupling of the US dollar from gold in Nixon's era, the United States finally embarked on a calm but difficult road: supporting the trade deficit by continuously expanding the scale of national debt, and then providing appropriate US dollar liquidity to the international market.

This has solved the problem of world trade (unified payment currency) and accelerated global integration. But the trouble of the American government has become even bigger.

In order to make the game of printing banknotes last longer, the value of the dollar began to fluctuate periodically, and the target of its linked pricing was oil, which has become the industrial blood of the world.

Therefore, it is not only the dollar that uses oil to maintain hegemony, but also adjusts the value of the dollar by adjusting the price of oil (in fact, the relationship with the dollar), thus exerting its power as a global financial baton.