Before I tell you about what Boumédiène tried to build in Algeria, let me tell you a story about Korean industrialization. Because you cannot understand why Algeria failed without first understanding what success actually looked like, structurally, and why it demanded something most resource-rich states are psychologically incapable of doing.

In 1961, Park Chung-hee seized power in South Korea over a country that produced almost nothing the world wanted to buy. No oil, no minerals worth speaking of, no favorable geography for agriculture at scale. GDP per capita was lower than most of sub-Saharan Africa. The country's primary export was cheap wigs made from human hair. That is not hyperbole. It is the historical record.

What Park understood, with unusual clarity for a military man, was that poverty itself could be weaponized as a development tool if and only if it was paired with a single non-negotiable condition: everything the state protected had to eventually compete and win in export markets. Not in the domestic market. Not against other Algerian or Korean producers. In the world market. Against Japan. Against Germany. Against the United States. That was the test, and it was the only test that mattered.

The instrument he used to get there was the chaebol privately owned industrial conglomerates like Hyundai, Samsung, and POSCO which the state directed through credit allocation, subsidies, and import protection. The state would shield a sector from foreign competition long enough for Korean firms to achieve scale, absorb technology, and drive down production costs. But the shield was explicitly temporary and explicitly conditional. The government set export targets. If a chaebol met them, it received more credit. If it failed to compete internationally, it lost state support. There was a real cost to failure, which meant the protection was being used as a ladder to climb toward global competitiveness, not as a shelter to hide from it permanently.

The steel industry is the clearest example. POSCO, founded in 1968, built one of the most modern integrated steel mills in the world with Japanese technology transferred as part of normalized relations between Korea and Japan. By the late 1970s, POSCO was producing steel at costs competitive with Japan and undercutting European and American producers in export markets. The protective tariff that sheltered POSCO in its early years was dismantled progressively as the company no longer needed it, because the company had been built from the beginning to survive without it.

The same logic ran through shipbuilding, electronics, and automotive manufacturing. Hyundai's first car, the Pony, was exported to Ecuador in 1976. It was not a good car. But it was on a trajectory. Every iteration of the product got better because the company was receiving real market feedback from real international buyers who had real alternatives. By the 1980s, Korean electronics were on shelves in American and European department s…

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