Looting, mass murder, and piracy on the high seas are in fashion, hypocrisy out of fashion

The 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil seized by the USA are worth something like $6 trillion, based on a price of $92 per barrel, which is 54 times Venezuela's annual GDP. 

Extracting this oil will require massive investments and years of infrastructure work. Will it be worth the trouble?

The damage done to America’s standing in the world by this is difficult to gauge as so many things have damaged it. 

After piracy, mass murder and starting a war without any pretence that it was provoked does America have a reputation to damage? 

I think it does because people get confused by wars, especially in the Middle East, and killing alleged drug smugglers and arresting ships quite legally carrying merchandise to Russia.  

This on the other hand can be understood by a child of five.

The American empire was always an enterprise dedicated to accumulating as much power and money as possible, run by people who were mostly dedicated to those things, but it used to be discreet about it and have plausible deniability.

The world is not run by psychopaths. They usually get found before they take power. Saddam and Stalin were exceptions. 

It is largely run by opportunists and self-interested people who like the political game which means trickery, deceit and backstabbing and a small element of political belief. Much the same is true of many large companies.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue and the decline in hypocrisy is a bad not a good thing.

The poet Arundhati Roy said, "So, the whole charade of Western liberal democracy is as much of a corpse under the rubble as the tens of thousands of Palestinians.” 

The same goes for other America's other killing fields.