In January 1899, the American gunboat USS Wilmington set out on an expedition to Venezuela, steaming up the Orinoco River toward the country’s interior. On board was an American diplomat, Francis Loomis, the US envoy to Venezuela. The mission was to show the flag, explore commercial opportunities – including routes to supply gold-mining operations – and display a little firepower.
An article in Naval History described how Loomis liked to demonstrate the ship’s Colt machine guns to local officials.
“This gun, firing some 500 shots a minute, produced a vivid impression here,” Loomis wrote in a report. “I made a point of having this gun fired anytime there were any army officials on board.”
“Gunboat diplomacy” has become a convenient shorthand for US President Donald Trump’s coercive foreign policy backed up by the threat of military force. Buoyed by the successful raid to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Trump is now pushing aggressively for ownership of Greenland – and signalling that the US will not be constrained as a global power.
The USS Wilmington, during a 1937 visit to Toronto, Canada.Toronto Star Archives/Getty Images
Trump’s words and actions now have observers reaching for the history books. The events of the past week stirred memories of long-forgotten chapters of US imperialism – from gunboat diplomacy and banana wars to full-scale colonial rule – that have left Washington’s traditional allies wondering if the world is returning to an era of great powers and vassal states.
Gunboat diplomacy was not limited to the Western Hemisphere. After World War I, the US Navy operated the Yangtze Patrol, a flotilla of gunboats that protected American interests – including missionaries and oil companies – inside China during a lengthy period of warlordism and instability. Those patrol boats also had a place in the American popular imagination, in part due to a film released in 1966: The Sand Pebbles, a Hollywood epic starring Steve McQueen as an enlisted sailor aboard the fictional USS San Pablo.
Trump’s intention to take control of Venezuela’s oil is also reminiscent of another era of American foreign policy: the so-called Banana Wars, a series of military expeditions and constabulary missions in Central America and the Caribbean that enforced US business interests. US Marines, for instance, would sustain deployments in Honduras, Nicaragua and Haiti. US forces landed in and occupied the Mexican port city of Veracruz in 1914.
Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, a legendary Marine and twice Medal of Honor winner, fought in those campaigns, as well as in the brutal Philippine-American War of 1899-1902. Following his retirement, Butler became an outspoken critic of American military adventurism, famously describing himself as “a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism” during his long military career.
Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler.Library of Congress/Corbis Historical/Getty Images
“The record of racketeering is long,” Butler wrote. “I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”
That critique of American foreign policy – that US high-mindedness and democratic idealism conceal naked corporate interests – persisted through the Cold War and into the 21st Century. So the perhaps most interesting development of the past week is the US administration’s shedding of lofty rhetoric around the Venezuela raid, as Trump did in an interview with The New York Times, asserting, “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.”
The protesters who held “no blood for oil” signs in 2003 to protest the US-led invasion of Iraq would no doubt have been surprised to see a sitting president saying that it was in fact about the oil
Protesters rally outside the White House on January 3, after the US captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
As interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan turned into lengthy occupation, the study of the “small wars” that Smedley Butler fought in came into vogue in military and foreign-policy circles. The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual was informed by the study of American interventions overseas as well as the British pacification campaigns during the Malaya Emergency and French wars in Indochina and Algeria.
Those military involvements are often described as “forever wars” by parts of Trump’s MAGA base. In a post on X, former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a staunch supporter of Trump, suggested that the operation to remove Maduro was part of a policy backed by successive Republican and Democratic administrations.
“Regime change, funding foreign wars, and Americans’ tax dollars being consistently funneled to foreign causes, foreigners both home and abroad, and foreign governments while Americans are consistently facing increasing cost of living, housing, healthcare, and learn about scams and fraud of their tax dollars is what has most Americans enraged,” she wrote, adding that “both parties, Republicans and Democrats, always keep the Washington military machine funded and going.”
The snatch-and-grab operation in Venezuela does look qualitatively different than the US interventions over the past two decades in one important respect. No US boots remained on the ground after the swift capture of Maduro, and the Trump administration has signalled little interest in the kind of armed state-building that Washington became enmeshed in after September 11, 2001.
But that will come as little relief to America’s NATO allies: Trump may have little interest in nation-building, but he has shown over the past week he is very serious about acquiring territory.
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