In the matter of war, the American language creates its own ... or the imminent threat of force (as in the “gunboat diplomacy” of the 1850s), to achieve national ends. *As of November 2018.

For the Standard, the deployment brought to mind "gunboat diplomacy," a pillar of 19th and early 20th-century foreign policy in which force or the threat thereof was used to advance U.S. interests ...