In January 1899, the American gunboat USS Wilmington embarked on an expedition to Venezuela, sailing up the Orinoco River into the interior of the country. Aboard the ship was U.S. diplomat Francis Loomis, the U.S. special envoy to Venezuela. Its mission was to fly the flag, explore commercial opportunities, including supply routes to gold mining operations, and display a modicum of firepower.
An article in Naval History notes that Loomis liked to demonstrate the ship’s Colt machine guns to local officials.
“This gun, firing approximately 500 rounds per minute, left a lasting impression here,” Loomis wrote in his report. “I have decided to fire this gun whenever military personnel are on board.”
“Gunboat diplomacy” has become a convenient shorthand for US President Donald Trump’s coercive foreign policy backed by the threat of military force. Emboldened by the success of capturing Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, President Trump is now aggressively pushing for ownership of Greenland, demonstrating that the United States will not be constrained as a world power.
President Trump’s words and actions now have observers reaching for the history books. The events of the past week have evoked long-forgotten memories of U.S. imperialism, from gunboat diplomacy and banana wars to full-scale colonialism, and have Washington’s traditional allies wondering whether the world is returning to an era of great powers and client states.
Gunboat diplomacy was not limited to the Western Hemisphere. After World War I, the U.S. Navy operated a gunboat force known as the Yangtze Patrol to protect U.S. interests, including missionaries and oil companies, in China, which had long been characterized by warlordism and instability. These patrol vessels found their place in the American public’s imagination in part due to the 1966 Hollywood blockbuster, The Sand Pebbles, starring Steve McQueen as a petty officer on the fictional battleship San Pablo.
President Trump’s intention to seize control of Venezuela’s oil is reminiscent of another era of American foreign policy, the so-called Banana Wars, a series of military expeditions and police missions in Central America and the Caribbean that coerced American business interests. For example, the U.S. Marine Corps will remain deployed to Honduras, Nicaragua, and Haiti. In 1914, U.S. forces landed and occupied the Mexican port city of Veracruz.
Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, a legendary Marine and two-time Medal of Honor recipient, served in these campaigns as well as the brutal Philippine-American War of 1899-1902. After leaving the military, Butler became an outspoken critic of American military adventurism, and during his long military career famously described himself as “a racketeer and gangster for capitalism.”
“The record of racketeering is long,” Butler wrote. “I helped clean up Nicaragua for the Brown Brothers International Bank from 1909 to 1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped Standard Oil go unhindered in China.”
Its critique of American foreign policy, that American aspirations and democratic idealism masked naked corporate interests, has endured from the Cold War era into the 21st century. So perhaps the most interesting development of the past week has been that the US government has gotten rid of the high-minded rhetoric about attacking Venezuela, as President Trump claimed in an interview with the New York Times: “We’re going to use oil, we’re going to take oil. We’re going to lower oil prices and give Venezuela the money that they desperately need.”
The demonstrators who held up “No Blood for Oil” signs to protest the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 would no doubt have been surprised if a sitting president said it was actually about oil.
As the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan became long-term occupations, studies of the “small wars” fought by Smedley Butler became popular in military and foreign policy circles. The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual was developed based on studies of American interventions overseas, the Malaya Emergency, and British peace operations during the French War in Indochina and Algeria.
These military engagements are often described as “forever wars” by some in President Trump’s MAGA base. Former Republican lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was once an ardent supporter of President Trump, suggested in a post on X that the operation to remove Maduro was part of a policy supported by successive Republican and Democratic administrations.
“Government change, the funding of foreign wars, and the fact that American tax dollars continue to be funneled to foreign causes, foreign nationals and governments at home and abroad, while Americans face consistently rising costs of living, housing, and health care, and are learning about tax fraud and fraud, infuriate most Americans,” she wrote, adding, “Both parties, Republican and Democratic, continue to consistently fund the military machine in Washington.”
The snatch-and-snatch operation in Venezuela appears to be qualitatively different from U.S. interventions over the past two decades in one important respect. After Mr. Maduro’s swift capture, there are no American boots left on the ground, and the Trump administration has shown little interest in building an armed state of the kind that the United States became embroiled in after September 11, 2001.
But that will provide little relief to America’s NATO allies. Mr. Trump may have little interest in nation-building, but he has shown over the past week that he is very serious about territorial gains.
