What Would Mahan Think About Trump’s Venezuela Strategy?

James Holmes

Naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan would likely be baffled by Trump’s war on drugs—but would be instantly familiar with his broader geopolitical motives in the Caribbean.

What would Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, America’s fin de siècle evangelist of sea power, say about the US blockade on Venezuelan tankers, and about Operation Southern Spear more broadly? Last Tuesday, President Donald Trump took to social media to announce “a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into, and out of, Venezuela.” The president’s post expanded the campaign—which to date has consisted mostly of naval demonstrations off the Venezuelan coast along with aerial raids against speedboats ruled to be carrying drugs to the United States—to something altogether more aggressive.

As a point of departure for thinking through Washington’s escalation in the Caribbean, why not conjure up the distinguished maritime historian and theorist? The ghost of Mahan may have wise counsel to tender. Let’s refract his possible views toward Southern Spear into four themes: counternarcotics, international law, geopolitics, and maritime strategy and operations. He would have more to say about each of these topics than the last.

Drugs May Have Been a Head-Scratcher for Mahan

First, counternarcotics. This mission would be a head-scratcher for Mahan. Not because he was unaware that navies perform constabulary duty—all do, including the US Navy in which he rose to ship command—but because, like other maritime historians and strategists of his age, the sea-power evangelist concentrated his scholarly energies chiefly on power politics. States, not drug cartels or other substate scourges, were the units of analysis throughout his imposing corpus of writings.

The Gulf and Caribbean in 2025 comprise the theater for a literal war on drugs against a Latin American state, not an external great power. Today’s circumstances would be novel to his experience. So it’s hard to extrapolate from the nautical sage’s works what he might say about counterdrug operations. He might remain silent.

Mahan Strongly Favored the Monroe Doctrine

Second, law. Mahan was a naval officer, historian, and maritime strategist, not an international lawyer. He did represent the US government at the Hague Conference on the Laws of War (1899), though largely as a technical expert. Apart from his technical acumen, he voiced opposition to arms-control measures that might fetter naval efficacy at a time when the US Navy was emerging as the Western Hemisphere’s foremost seaborne fighting force.

Mahan also echoed a consistent theme in US diplomacy, opposing compulsory international arbitration that might infringe on US prerogatives under the quasi-legal Monroe Doctrine. For instance, he defended the Doctrine in the context of… wait for it… a crisis in  Venezuela (1902). That’s when President Theodore Roosevelt covertly dispatched the US Navy battle fleet to the Caribbean as a deterrent. It appeared a European naval squadron might seize one or more coastal sites in Venezuela after Caracas defaulted on its debts to European banks. In the process, European debt collection would violate the Doctrine’s prohibition on extraregional great powers wresting ground from Latin American republics. TR used the battle fleet to shadow the European force and discourage such a breach.

Ergo, Mahan approved of vigorous, even preventive enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine.

With that said, it remains unclear whether Mahan would approve of the recently unveiled US National Security Strategy, which vows to enforce a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.” It certainly appears that Russia and Iran are wont to meddle in Venezuela. But there appears to be little threat that they will take possession of Venezuelan territory or mount a standing military presence there. No seizure of turf, no breach of the Doctrine as traditionally construed. The Trump Corollary is outside Mahan’s experience.

Mahan Understood Venezuela’s Strategic Location

Third, geopolitics. Mahan might go along with an interventionist Trump Corollary on geopolitical grounds. A few years after his landmark treatise The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, he explored the “Strategic Features of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico” in minute detail. He dubbed the Panama Canal then digging as America’s “gateway between the Atlantic and the Pacific” while fretting about potential great-power threats to the sea lanes that would come into being once the artificial waterway opened (in 1914).

Venezuela occupies prime real estate adjoining these shipping lanes. Forces based there could conceivably menace maritime traffic. For Mahan, quelling regional instability might warrant the interventionist stance codified in the National Security Strategy—especially if Caracas played host to foreign military forces able to strike out to sea.

Mahan Was No Stranger to Economic Warfare

Lastly, the practical dimension. Mahan would instantly grasp the strategic and operational logic impelling the US blockade of Venezuela. In fact, he performed blockade duty himself, in his cast against the breakaway Confederacy during the American Civil War.

In The Influence of Sea Power upon History, Mahan depicted sea power as a “chain” connecting domestic industrial production to seaborne transport to rimlands where U.S. manufacturers wanted to trade, mainly East Asia and Western Europe. Mahan defined command of the sea in mercantile terms. Command was “overbearing power on the sea which drives the enemy’s flag from it, or allows it to appear only as a fugitive; and which, by controlling the great common, closes the highways by which commerce moves to and from the enemy’s shores.” This was a way to put the economic hurt on a foe that traded by sea.

Today, US command of Caribbean waters breaks the central link in the Venezuelan sea-power chain. The blockade pinches the trade in hydrocarbons on which strongman Nicolás Maduro’s rule largely depends. It could coerce Maduro into cracking down on drug cartels. In the extreme case it could bring down his rule from within—fulfilling Washington’s maximal political goal.

So President Trump’s “total and complete blockade” has not just operational and strategic but even political import. Alfred Thayer Mahan might not have much to say about the constabulary dimension of US operations in the Caribbean. He could probably be talked into a Trump Corollary if convinced events in Venezuela posed a danger to shipping in the Caribbean. And, no matter where he came down on U.S. policy aims, the historian would certainly applaud the methods underwriting the naval blockade. They are Mahanian to a T.

There you have it—a mixed verdict on Southern Spear from beyond the grave.

About the Author: James Holmes

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College, a Distinguished Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, and a Faculty Fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface-warfare officer and combat veteran of the first Gulf War, he served as a weapons and engineering officer in the battleship Wisconsin, engineering and firefighting instructor at the Surface Warfare Officers School Command, and military professor of strategy at the Naval War College. He holds a PhD in international affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and MAs in mathematics and international relations from Providence College and Salve Regina University. The views voiced here are his alone.