gunboat diplomacy

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

an idiom describing the use or threatened use of military force — historically naval warships — to coerce a weaker state into making political or economic concessions, named after the practice of nineteenth-century European powers dispatching gunboats to the ports of weaker states to back up diplomatic demands with the implicit threat of bombardment; the practice was central to European imperialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America — Britain's gunboat diplomacy in China culminating in the Opium Wars and the treaty port system is the paradigmatic case — and gave rise to the idiom as shorthand for coercive power politics conducted without formal war; in contemporary usage the phrase is used more broadly to describe any diplomatic negotiation in which military power is visibly deployed to back up demands, or disparagingly to criticise any use of military threats in what are framed as diplomatic contexts; the idiom implies a lack of genuine reciprocity in the diplomatic process and is most often used by the party being coerced