The Shadow of the Gunboat: Venezuela, Oil, and the New Cold Front
In November 2025 the Caribbean Sea is hosting the largest American naval deployment the region has seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. A nuclear-powered supercarrier, an amphibious assault group with two thousand Marines embarked, guided-missile destroyers, attack submarines, stealth fighters, and reconnaissance drones are arrayed in a loose arc between fifty and two hundred nautical miles off the Venezuelan coast. Washington describes the operation as a counter-narcotics mission and an exercise in sanctions enforcement. Moscow, Havana, most Latin American capitals, and a growing chorus of international observers call it something far older: gunboat diplomacy reborn, the first time in one hundred and twenty-two years that a great power has dusted off the 1902–1903 European playbook and aimed it, unilaterally and with overwhelming force, at Venezuela. The phrase “gunboat diplomacy” was coined for exactly this kind of spectacle. A stronger navy appears uninvited, parks itself in...