This week, Meidas Defense’s Joe Plenzler sat down for a chat with Jonathan Katz - an award-winning journalist and author of Gangsters of Capitalism, which traces the legacy of two-time Medal of Honor recipient Major General Smedley Butler to understand the history of America’s empire and how Trump is turning America foreign policy back to the bad old days of large power competition. Katz is a frequent commentator on foreign policy and was the only American reporter stationed in Haiti during the devastating 2010 earthquake.
The Return of Gunboat Diplomacy: The Maduro Abduction, The Cuba Blockade, and the New Banana Wars
By Joe Plenzler
The early hours of January 3, 2026, marked a definitive rupture in the post-Cold War order of the Western Hemisphere. With the execution of Operation Absolute Resolve, a massive joint military and law enforcement raid that resulted in the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from Caracas, the United States didn’t just pivot its foreign policy—it performed a complete U-turn. Coupled with a more recent and draconian oil blockade against Cuba that has paralyzed the island’s power grid and hospitals - threatening starvation and epidemic - Washington has signaled a full-throated return to the Gunboat Diplomacy of the early 20th century.
To understand the present, one must look back at the era of the Banana Wars, when the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps acted as the enforcement arm for American commercial interests across Central America and the Caribbean. Perhaps no one summarized this era more chillingly than Major General Smedley D. Butler, the two-time Medal of Honor recipient who, in his 1935 work War Is a Racket, famously confessed:
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service... and during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
A century later, the script remains remarkably similar, though the bananas have been replaced by oil.
The “Trump Corollary” and the Logic of Extraction
The administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy introduced what analysts are calling the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. It asserts that the U.S. has the “inherent constitutional authority” to intervene militarily in the hemisphere to combat “narcoterrorism”—a label now applied to a wide array of organizations and countries.
While the official justification for the Caracas raid centers on drug trafficking indictments, the economic subtext is impossible to ignore. Shortly after the operation, President Trump met with top oil executives, promising a Renaissance for American firms in the Orinoco Belt. By seizing control of Venezuelan oil production and diverting royalties to U.S.-run accounts, the administration would be practicing exactly what Butler decried: using the military to secure safe environments for American capital. As Butler noted of his own exploits, he helped make “Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914.” Today, the U.S. military is once again being used to pacify a nation for the benefit of the energy sector.
The Siege of Cuba: Diplomacy by Deprivation
Parallel to the Venezuelan intervention is the tightening noose around Havana. The January 2026 Executive Order, which imposes secondary tariffs on any nation providing oil to Cuba, has triggered a humanitarian catastrophe. By cutting off the Venezuelan oil lifeline and threatening Mexico and other suppliers, the U.S. has effectively enforced a modern-day naval blockade without the formal declaration.
Trump and Rubio’s goal is the not promotion of democracy in any traditional sense; it is coercive diplomacy designed to induce state collapse.It mirrors the tactics of the early 1900s, where the U.S. frequently occupied customs houses and seized national revenues to ensure stability—meaning the unmolested flow of American trade. By holding the Cuban people’s electricity and water access hostage to a deal, Washington is treating sovereign nations as vassal states who owe tribute.
The Specter of the Gangster State
The danger of returning to this racketeering model is the erosion of international law. Critics at Chatham House and the United Nations have pointed out that the abduction of a sitting head of state—regardless of his domestic legitimacy—sets a dangerous precedent that turns the globe into a frontier where only the strongest prevail.
Butler’s warning was that when the military is used as muscle for private interests, it ceases to be a force for national defense and becomes a tool for international plunder. The 2026 intervention in Venezuela and the blockade of Cuba represent a rejection of the multilateralism that defined the late 20th century in favor of a transactional, America First imperialism.
Conclusion
As U.S. ships and airplanes patrol the Caribbean and Venezuelan crude begins to flow toward Texas refineries under military guard, the echoes of the past are deafening. We have entered a second era of the Banana Wars, characterized by the same gangsterism for capitalism that Major General Butler lamented a century ago. The question for the American public is whether they are willing to accept the moral and strategic costs of using the world’s most powerful military as a mob collection agency for Wall Street and Trump’s cronies.
If the goal is truly a stable and democratic Western hemisphere, history suggests that gunboats and abductions are far more likely to sow the seeds of future resentment than lasting peace.
