David Oliver: Trump's gunboat diplomacy will soon run up against MAGA base

When U.S. naval officer Matthew Perry showed up in Edo Bay in July 1853, his “black ships” were not bringing a message of peace but a simple ultimatum: trade or deal with our gunboats. Over 200 years of Japanese isolation under the Tokugawa shogunate was swiftly concluded.

“Gunboat diplomacy,” a coercive tactic developed most successfully by the Royal Navy, often works without a shot being fired because of the mere presence of a navy’s awesome power off a country’s coastline.

Much of the commentary following last weekend’s audacious raid on Venezuela, in what U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed was a “law enforcement operation,” has focused on whether U.S. President Donald Trump is following a modern-day version of the Monroe Doctrine. Or, as Trump himself is now calling it, the “Donroe Doctrine.”

Almost as soon as Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife had been landed on to the USS Iwo Jima and he began their inauspicious journey to New York, speculation abounded about who or what might be next.

“Operation Absolute Resolve” was a lightning-fast mission that involved numerous airstrikes and helicopter raids. Venezuela’s Russian-made air-defence systems, including the S-300VM and Buk-M2E, performed poorly, as they did during Israel’s operations over Iran last summer.

U.S. special forces entered, acted swiftly and then withdrew with Maduro. No “boots on the ground” remained. While Trump has said that the U.S. will “run” Venezuela, it is clear it will not involve U.S. personnel on the ground, which so spectacularly failed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. will use gunboat diplomacy to coerce the Venezuelan government to work toward America’s political objectives. Yet this speaks to the limits placed of American military force, many of which are domestic political considerations.

The much-vaunted U.S. National Security Strategy revealed the tensions that sit at the heart of this administration’s political coalition between securing its “America First” foreign policy objectives while not upsetting the strongly non-interventionist wing of Trump’s MAGA base.

Trump is not a pure non-interventionist. He will act to further his and his country’s mercantilist interests as long as he can avoid costly and politically difficult long-term engagements. This limits U.S. actions to ones that can be achieved with no ground commitments, or to situations in which the U.S. can quickly overwhelm its opponent. That latter assessment is, however, as Russian President Vladimir Putin found in Ukraine, fraught with risk.

Trump himself has referenced the targets that might be in his cross-hairs next, and by understanding how the U.S. will act, we can deduce the sort of operations that may occur.

Greenland is not an especially difficult military objective. It has a small population, mostly on its coastline, is in close proximity to the U.S. and America already has a military base there. It does, however, come with significant international political issues, as annexation would effectively end NATO overnight.

While Trump may not care for NATO, the sudden and brutal dissolution of the alliance due to the annexation of an ally’s territory is something even Trump would struggle to manage politically.

While the U.S. could take the longer-term approach of building its economic and military presence in Greenland, Trump clearly wants to deliver the territory before his term is up.

Meanwhile, the more overtly coercive effects of the American military buildup in the Caribbean could now to be turned towards Cuba, Colombia or Mexico.

Cuba’s status remains a huge thorn in the side of the U.S., and especially Cuban-Americans like Rubio. Its oil supply, which is hugely dependent on Venezuela, can now be controlled by the U.S. It will also have dawned on Cuban leaders that the sort of focused, lightening operation that was just carried out against Maduro could be used against them.

Colombia, with its own coast exposed to the Caribbean Sea, could also be attacked in a similar manner to Venezuela. But aside from supplying America with large quantities of illicit drugs, it has rather less to economically interest Trump compared to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.

Trump threatened to take military action against Mexican drug cartels in his first administration. Those threats have resurfaced with Trump now claiming that . It’s not impossible to see precision strikes against the cartels, which would play well domestically, but it would be less straight forward than Venezuela.

The key to gunboat diplomacy is the sense of coercion that targets feel before shots are even fired, but it has its limits.

As maritime strategist Julian S. Corbett remarked, “Since men live upon the land and not upon the sea, great issues between nations at war have always been decided — except in the rarest cases — either by what your army can do against your enemy’s territory … or else by fear of what the fleet makes it possible for your army to do.”

Whatever its coercive potential, gunboat diplomacy has its limits unless armies are prepared to go to war — something that America’s potential targets know is still a political no-go for this president, despite his bluster.

National Post

David Oliver is a geopolitical strategy expert and founder of Minerva Group. You can follow him on his Substack, the Ultima Ratio.