The word “loot” entered the English language from Hindi in the late 18th century, as the rapacious East India Company plundered its way across the subcontinent.
It was a trading company, not a state – but it had the imprimatur of the English crown and its own large private army, mingling commerce and military force and opening the way for British imperial dominance of India.
Donald Trump’s dead-of-night raid on Venezuela last week was the act of a government, not a corporation. But it harked back to a more brazen age, when looting a continent for its resources at the point of a cannon was regarded as a legitimate activity for an English gentleman.
The US president made no effort to disguise the fact that the main motivation for the snatching of Nicolás Maduro was taking control of Venezuelan oil reserves on behalf of the fossil fuel companies that helped bankroll his re-election.
Trump did gesture at Maduro’s illegitimacy – the deposed and unloved president was widely accepted to have lost the election in 2024. But handing power to Maduro’s deputy, with no timeline for a democratic transition, makes a nonsense of any claim to be fulfilling the aspirations of the oppressed Venezuelan people.
The US president had already wielded American economic power particularly blatantly in trade negotiations over the first 12 months of this second term, using the threat of tariffs to bully and cajole rivals and supposed allies alike – including the UK.
Last weekend’s events made clear he is also prepared to seize resources using military force, apparently with the intention of allowing favoured corporate allies (oligarchs, as we might call them in a Russian context) to exploit them.
It sets a deeply alarming precedent, in terms of what Trump himself might feel emboldened to do, with a string of other targets apparently in his sights, and what rival powers even less concerned about international law could now venture, in pursuit of economic dominance.
Just as Trump’s music tastes are stuck in the days of his youth – he still likes a boogie to YMCA – his conception of what factors make the US economically successful feels hopelessly outdated.
The global oil market is already well supplied, and the US has anyway become a significant net exporter since the shale boom, insulating its economy from the global energy price rises that hit Europe hard after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
There are some concerns about whether US hard-to-extract shale oil is economic at the current, relatively low oil price of less than $60 (£44) a barrel for the US West Texas Intermediate benchmark, however. Yet Trump appears to want to drive that price lower.
He is unlikely to succeed any time soon anyway: heavy Venezuelan oil is expensive to produce and refine, and analysts believe it will take many years, and billions of dollars, to boost output significantly.
As the Washington-based Institute of International Finance put it last week: “While medium- to long-term upside to Venezuelan supply exists, the balance of risks points to a gradual and conditional recovery rather than swift normalisation, with the potential for renewed setbacks if political or policy frictions intensify.”
Instead of oil, the resource bottlenecks that most concern today’s corporations are in the raw materials required for the mass electrification of energy, as the world shifts to net zero (something Trump rejects, of course) – copper, aluminiumand lithium – not to mention staple foods such as cocoa and coffee, of which prices have been jacked up by global heating.
Similarly, while Trump hoped his muscular trade policy would lead to a wave of reshoring, restoring US dominance in sectors such as carmaking and steel, manufacturing employment has continued to decline, with the sector shedding more than 200,000 jobs over two years.
Slashing government grants for scientific research and attacking major US universities on culture war grounds appears unlikely to nourish the innovation widely seen as a key to US economic success.
And rival countries hit hard by US tariffs are being pushed together, with the EU finally giving provisional agreement last week to the tortuously negotiated trade agreement with Mercosur, the South American bloc that includes Brazil and Argentina.
While Trump fantasises about bringing back metal bashing, the US’s great economic rival China is continuing to innovate in the fields of electric cars and cut-price solar panels, at the leading edge of the transition away from fossil fuels.
Between January and May last year alone China added enough wind and solar capacity to power a country as large as Turkey or Indonesia.
The Chinese AI company DeepSeek is reportedly preparing to release the next iteration of its large language model next month – a move that could spark alarm in Silicon Valley if, like its predecessor, it appears to outperform US equivalents at a fraction of the cost.
Trump’s attempt at looting Venezuela’s resources is a raw exercise of military muscle, and there may be more – perhaps worse – to come. But by unleashing anarchy abroad and trashing the rule of law at home, he is more likely to undermine US economic power than enhance it.