The president must walk a fine line between securing his 'America First' foreign policy and not upsetting his non-interventionist base

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When U.S. naval officer Matthew Perry showed up in Edo Bay in July 1853, his “black ships” were not bringing a message of peace but a simple ultimatum: trade or deal with our gunboats. Over 200 years of Japanese isolation under the Tokugawa shogunate was swiftly concluded.

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“Gunboat diplomacy,” a coercive tactic developed most successfully by the Royal Navy, often works without a shot being fired because of the mere presence of a navy’s awesome power off a country’s coastline.

Much of the commentary following last weekend’s audacious raid on Venezuela, in what U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed was a “law enforcement operation,” has focused on whether U.S. President Donald Trump is following a modern-day version of the Monroe Doctrine. Or, as Trump himself is now calling it, the “