Literal Combat Ships

No art for this deal

The world’s largest aircraft carrier, Ford-class aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), operates in the western Atlantic Ocean, Nov. 13, 2025. U.S. military forces are deployed to the Caribbean in support of the U.S. Southern Command mission, Department of War-directed operations, and the president’s priorities to disrupt illicit drug trafficking and protect the homeland. (U.S. Navy photo)

Do you remember the period before the Russian invasion of Ukraine? It was weird. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers massed on or near the border of Ukraine, and lots of indications (or leaks) that military action was imminent—and a strange air of unreality about the whole thing. Do countries do this anymore? Even the fact that Russia had invaded Ukraine already—back in 2014—had been muffled a bit by the whole “little green men” subterfuge and other tactics.

It feels a little bit like that now. The Trump administration has deployed an immense amount of firepower near Venezuela and has issued a series of escalating demands, most recently asking for “our” oil “back”. (There’s a little more to this than incredulous posters might guess—Venezuela did nationalize the oil industry in 1976—but the context doesn’t exactly convince the unpersuaded.) Do countries do this anymore?

Trump often feels like a man from a different time—specifically, about 1865—and his absolute belief in using the pose of gunboat diplomacy is one of the most striking manifestations of this. We are about to speedrun the rediscovery of why states stopped acting like this, but in the meantime

It’s unlikely that the outcome of Trump’s threats to use military force will be straightforward. The Trump administration isn’t—publicly—asking for anything that the government of Nicolas Maduro can give, since mostly what Washington is asking for is for Maduro to leave power and place himself at the mercy of someone else. Leaders don’t like to become formers, and dictators don’t like to give up countries—it’s a good way to go from “dictator” to “dead”. And then there’s the small matter of national pride and whatnot: the whole thesis of Chavismo has been that the Bolivarian Republic can stand up to imperialist powers, and after decades in that struggle it would be hard for Maduro to walk away in the face of these threats.

The United States, for all its power, doesn’t automatically prevail in these confrontations. Philip Hahn’s 2017 book Coercion, Survival, and War (Stanford UP) demonstrated that most U.S. threats against weaker countries fail. The problem is that the United States is too powerful: weaker states can either submit to threats, in which case they risk losing everything, or they can resist and hope to preserve something. What increases the likelihood of failure? Well, when the U.S. asks for territory or regime change.

Ah.

One of Haun’s smart moves in the book is to ask why, if U.S. demands fail, the U.S. issues them in the first place. His answer is that presenting a choice between peace and submission can help to justify a military campaign the U.S. wants to engage in. That is, the threats are meant to fail.

Ah.

So is this all an attempt to generate an excuse for war? Well…maybe. On the other hand, the ships have been in the neighborhood for a few weeks now, and the airstrikes haven’t begun yet. Venezuela isn’t entirely defenseless but…one assumes that it could be rendered unable to react to airstrikes pretty quickly. (A full ground invasion might be a different story.) Instead, the Trump administration has been gradually ratcheting up the pressure. That’s actually as much or more consistent with trying to not go through the costs—financial, human, and above all political—of war as it is with wanting to go to war.

And yet. There’s also the case that the demands are simply difficult to take seriously as the beginning for negotiations, much less a negotiation for a sort of pacted transition in which the opposition and the government would sit down and reasonably find a way to share power in advance of free elections. (Among other considerations, I wonder if the show of U.S. force hasn’t potentially made the opposition less likely to win elections now—although this is purely speculation on my part!) If those negotiations are unlikely to provide an off-ramp or a solution, the choices resolve to backing down or going ahead pretty quickly.

What could the Trump administration use as a way to declare victory and go home? Like the U.S. twelve-minute war with Iran this summer, perhaps it could bomb some regime and military sites, or recognize a new opposition figure to take charge of frozen assets and embassies, or wait for right-wing governments to take charge of enough South American countries to bring the issue to a head again.

Or maybe he could just get bored and go home. This is more or less what happened with the campaign against the Houthis earlier this year—the U.S. didn’t win and the Houthis definitely didn’t lose, but the United States also just isn’t trying to keep the sea lanes open in the same way it threatened to.

The policy of constantly seizing (sanctioned) oil tankers is surprisingly Kennedy-esque—almost like the “quarantine” around Cuba in 1962, during the Bay of Pigs crisis—and may well start to choke off the Venezuelan economy. Of course, there’s hardly any guarantee that such tough sanctions will lead to the collapse of the regime! But it might contribute to brittleness and offer other options to Washington (like bribery or subversion).

So I don’t think—right now—that we’re about to see a massive invasion. I think that this is probably going to linger on for a while (weeks? months?). But I think the largest certain outcome is that the web of norms and routines that have stopped states from using 21st-century power to undertake 19th-century behavior will be still further frayed. From Russia invading Ukraine to Belraus hijacking a civilian plane overflying its territory to the United States acting like its will is sovereign in this hemisphere—and, of course, executing alleged drug boats like they were pirates, hostis humani generis—we are seeing a rush back to the past, might making … if not right, at least a mess.

“The United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law,” wrote U.S. Secretary of State Richard B. Olney in 1895, warning off the United Kingdom during a different confrontation over Venezuela. The Trump administration seems to agree with the prescription, at least from Greenland to the Orinoco. But it was not true then and it is less true now. Force may work in the short term, but naked aggression without any real justification is unlikely to persuade audiences at home or abroad that the government is doing something sensible. Regardless of whether there is a large-scale military confrontation or not, the United States is becoming not an indispensable nation but a rogue elephant.