Gunboat Diplomacy: A matter of definition

It’s still only a matter of days since Nicolás Maduro was – and here I’m not sure which neutral verb to use, so let’s hedge our bets and say ‘spirited’ out of Caracas in Operation Absolute Resolve, which played out like the thrillingest Hollywood blockbuster.

In a delightful US American verbing which was new to me (and should have a hyphen, but I’m giving the BBC’s report verbatim), el Presidente Trump noted of Maduro: ‘He made it to the door. He was unable to close it. He got bum rushed* so fast that he didn’t get into that [(a supposedly impregnable) room].’

On Sunday mornings, the BBC has a current affairs programme on its Radio Four, and it was there, sometime after nine o’clock on Sunday, 4 January, that I first heard the phrase ‘gunboat diplomacy’ being buffed up and resurrected, if you’ll forgive my mixed metaphors.  

It rang a slightly tinny bell, of course. I must have heard/read it first in my schooldays in discussions of some long-ago episode of imperial chest-baring such as the nineteenth-century British Opium Wars.

But that was a long time ago – the nineteenth century and my schooldays. In contrast, gunboat diplomacy is big, big, big in the news again now.

Those quaint old vectors of information and opinion, newspapers and magazines, are afroth with it, from the British Daily Torygraph’s, ‘In the volatile new world, one thing is certain: American gunboat diplomacy is back’ on Sunday, 4 January; to the South China Morning Post’s sententious and arguably disingenuous subhead: ‘The United States returns to gunboat diplomacy, 21st-century style: China’s consensual approach and win-win multilateralism will, in the long run, prevail in Latin America over US militant bullying’ on 5 January.’

The peaks and troughs in the word’s evolution on Google Ngrams are quite pronounced. It rises sharply after 1940 to reach its first peak in 1974, then falls back a little to peak again in 2016. Whether this is for external reasons or just a result of  waves of publication is impossible to tell.

And as the data only reaches to 2022, it will be for future generations to pore over the peak that may possibly occur as a result of the recent brouhaha.

But what exactly is gunboat diplomacy anyway? I mean, is it what some people call a ‘contested’ term, one that has differing interpretations and nuance according to your political stance, or would most people would agree on a definition?

Some definitions

Let’s see. Merriam-Webster online defines it as ‘diplomacy backed by the use or threat of military force.’ As far as we know, there were indeed diplomatic manoeuvres before US special forces Chinooked ‘el payaso’ (‘the clown’) away, but had the US threatened military action? If not, I see a disjuncture between the diplomacy and the action in this definition.

Collins adds a facet which is surely rather important, as per my underlining: ‘diplomacy conducted by threats of military intervention, esp by a major power against a militarily weak state.’

I wondered if perhaps ‘weak’ should be modified to ‘weaker’, but the nuance still holds. Russia, for instance, could hardly use ‘gunboat diplomacy’ against China.

And then Webster’s New World College Dictionary, also hosted on the Collins site, adds further nuance: ‘the use or threatened use of limited military force in place of conventional diplomatic negotiations’.

That’s another wrinkle: there’s no likelihood whatsoever of all-out war, as the expectation is that the weaker party will cave at the first display of force.

D’oh! Aren’t we still missing something? The naval element. Arguably not. Although the phrase is self-evidently based on the historical use of overwhelming naval force, contemporary citations suggest it can apply to any pressure, naval or not, applied to an adversary:

Although the term ‘gunboat diplomacy might evoke a bygone era, the strategic deployment of military assets remains a viable deterrent against threats to American interests.

The OED definition goes even further in divorcing the word from its maritime origins by talking about ‘any form of coercion’ and producing an example in evidence. How widespread that metaphorical use is, I’m not convinced.

‘The use of military force or the threat of military force to influence negotiations or diplomatic relations between countries; (now also in extended use) the use of any form of coercion to obtain a desired outcome in relations or negotiations.’

Perhaps TV companies who pay a king’s ransom to show Test cricket live should resort to a little gunboat diplomacy of their own. Nothing would make cricketers get on with it faster than a threat to pull the plug on the single biggest contributor to their wages.

That said, the most comprehensive yet also the most narrowly focused definition is given on the Wikipedia page about gunboat diplomacy, taken from an academic monograph by a theoretician of the phenomenon:

‘Gunboat diplomacy is the pursuit of foreign policy objectives with the aid of conspicuous displays of naval power, implying or constituting a direct threat of warfare should terms not be agreeable to the superior force.’

It’s clear that Chinese naval activity round Taiwan and recent US activity in the Caribbean both fall under this rubric. And the US has historically been one of the major adopters of gunboat diplomacy, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in pursuit of the Monroe Doctrine – now waggishly renamed the Donroe Doctrine – that any foreign intervention in the Western Hemisphere is inimical to US interests.

Perhaps ironically, it was European powers, Italy, Germany and Britain, who resorted to gunboat diplomacy the last time it was used against the Venezuelan government, in 1902–3.

What’s the earliest citation of the phrase?

The OED gives the earliest citations from 1869. It’s from the 4 September edition of the New York Times, so the phrase is one of the thousands of gifts to English that came from the US:

The Chinese Government could not reasonably expect this sudden revival of the old style of gunboat diplomacy. ‘Do whatever we wish, or we will bombard your cities and blockade your ports.

The gunboat diplomats in this case were the British on Formosa (now Taiwan).

Gunboats are generally small, fast ships, and although these were the vessels generally deployed in the 19C and early 20C, they were not alone. In the 1902–3 action against Venezuela, cruisers and torpedo boats were also brought into action.

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* The British idiom is ‘to give someone the bum’s rush‘, meaning to chuck them out of somewhere, or to dismiss them out of hand.