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.

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

© The National Interest