"gunboat diplomacy."

[furtherfield]

Notes on a week of significance

A little housekeeping is in order to start a week that may be quite
significant in all our lives. First of all, a correction. The other day I
claimed that the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk was heading for Korean waters.
Not so. It's been sent to the Gulf. So many carrier task forces are now
circling in the Gulf and the Mediterranean (with a French one recently
dispatched as well) that there must be aircraft-carrier gridlock in the
region.

Sometimes I'm overwhelmed by the a-historicity of the media. I have yet to
see anyone use the classic imperial phrase, "gunboat diplomacy." If you want
to know what that once meant just drop back to the nineteenth century and
read about the "Opium Wars," when English warships busted China open to the
drug trade and, in due course, to neocolonial possession, turmoil,
warlordism, and finally a violent, massive people's revolution that reached
its own catastrophic end in our time.

http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=383