{"id":506068,"date":"2026-01-10T12:01:15","date_gmt":"2026-01-10T12:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/506068\/"},"modified":"2026-01-10T12:01:15","modified_gmt":"2026-01-10T12:01:15","slug":"farewell-forever-wars-hello-empire-the-week-that-changed-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/506068\/","title":{"rendered":"Farewell, forever wars, hello empire? The week that changed the world"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n In January 1899, the American gunboat USS Wilmington set out on an expedition to Venezuela, steaming up the Orinoco River toward the country\u2019s interior. On board was an American diplomat, Francis Loomis, the US envoy to Venezuela. The mission was to show the flag, explore commercial opportunities \u2013 including routes to supply gold-mining operations \u2013 and display a little firepower.\n <\/p>\n

\n An article in Naval History described<\/a> how Loomis liked to demonstrate the ship\u2019s Colt machine guns to local officials.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThis gun, firing some 500 shots a minute, produced a vivid impression here,\u201d Loomis wrote in a report. \u201cI made a point of having this gun fired anytime there were any army officials on board.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cGunboat diplomacy<\/a>\u201d has become a convenient shorthand for US President Donald Trump\u2019s coercive foreign policy backed up by the threat of military force. Buoyed by the successful raid<\/a> to capture Venezuelan leader Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, Trump is now pushing aggressively for ownership of Greenland \u2013 and signalling that the US will not be constrained<\/a> as a global power.\n <\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

\n Trump\u2019s 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 \u2013 from gunboat diplomacy and banana wars to full-scale colonial rule \u2013 that have left Washington\u2019s traditional allies wondering if the world is returning to an era of great powers and vassal states.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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 \u2013 including missionaries and oil companies \u2013 inside China during a lengthy period of warlordism and instability<\/a>. 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>, a Hollywood epic starring Steve McQueen as an enlisted sailor aboard the fictional USS San Pablo.\n <\/p>\n

\n Trump\u2019s intention to take control of Venezuela\u2019s 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n 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<\/a>. Following his retirement, Butler became an outspoken critic of American military adventurism, famously describing himself as \u201ca racketeer, a gangster for capitalism\u201d during his long military career.\n <\/p>\n

\"Maj.<\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe record of racketeering is long,\u201d Butler wrote. \u201cI 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.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n That critique of American foreign policy \u2013 that US high-mindedness and democratic idealism conceal naked corporate interests \u2013 persisted through the Cold War and into the 21st Century. So the perhaps most interesting development of the past week is the US administration\u2019s shedding of lofty rhetoric around the Venezuela raid, as Trump did in an interview with The New York Times, asserting, \u201cWe\u2019re going to be using oil, and we\u2019re going to be taking oil. We\u2019re getting oil prices down, and we\u2019re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The protesters who held \u201cno blood for oil\u201d 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\n <\/p>\n

\"Protesters<\/p>\n

\n As interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan turned into lengthy occupation, the study of the \u201csmall wars\u201d 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<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n

\n Those military involvements are often described as \u201cforever wars\u201d by parts of Trump\u2019s MAGA base. In a post on X<\/a>, 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cRegime change, funding foreign wars, and Americans\u2019 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,\u201d she wrote, adding that \u201cboth parties, Republicans and Democrats, always keep the Washington military machine funded and going.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n 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.\n <\/p>\n

\n But that will come as little relief to America\u2019s 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.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In January 1899, the American gunboat USS Wilmington set out on an expedition to Venezuela, steaming up the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":506069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[50,103],"class_list":{"0":"post-506068","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115870701061193511","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/506069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}