Gunboat Diplomacy / Live-Action TV

• House of the Dragon: Whenever Daemon Targaryen wants to make a point or flex his muscle, he will break out his dragon Caraxes, who will often loom over the assembled party as Daemon is talking.
  • Rhaenyra attempts this in the Season One finale, by sending her sons on dragonback to remind undeclared Lords of their oaths of loyalty. A Prince of the Realm delivering the message personally on his dragon sends a very powerful message. Unfortunately her rivals had the same idea, sending the most intimidating Prince of the Realm (Aemond) on the back of the most intimidating dragon (Vhagar), to Storm's End first. To say that the rest of the parley does not go well for young Prince Lucerys and his dragon Arrax is a crass understatement.
• In just the second episode of Yes, Minister, Hacker finds himself faced with a tricky situation involving the new dictator of an African state who, for various reasons, they need something from, but who is threatening to cause an embarrassing incident. The foreign secretary muses jokingly that in the old days they would just send in a gunboat. After a brief chuckle from everyone, Hacker asks if that is, absolutely, out of the question, to shocked stares.^note The problem is solved when the Brits realize that the dictator is actually one of Hacker's old friends from uni, who has changed his name and converted to Islam as a political move; they settle the whole thing over a nice cup of tea.
  • In Yes, Prime Minister, Hacker (now PM) arranges for a full battalion of paratroopers to pay a goodwill visit to a small third-world country, against Sir Humphrey's wishes, that may just be about to suffer from a Communist uprising.
    Hacker: And the Americans say they have an entire airborne division standing by in case we need reinforcements.
    Sir Humphrey: Of what?!
    Hacker: Reinforcements of goodwill, Humphrey!
• Happens quite often in the various versions of Star Trek. Captain Kirk from Star Trek: The Original Series does it well because he is such a badass.
  • Federation diplomacy seems to consist of sending two diplomats to discuss things in a patronising manner, then holding the talks on a massively over-armed starship in orbit above one of the party's homeworld.
  • This is lampshaded in the original script for "A Taste of Armageddon". Scotty protests "I haven't served 30 years in the engine room of a Starship to be accused of gunboat diplomacy!" In the episode, he actually says, "The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank!" One of the reasons why it happens so often is that the first contact goes violent often enough that you have to back it up with firepower simply to be safe — and as warp travel is generally too slow to get reinforcements there in reasonable time, that means the ship making first contact has to have that firepower. The ships simultaneously display the benefits of Federation friendship (access to amazing technology) and the downsides of enmity (very very big guns). End result: the Federation keeps making initial agreements with newly discovered species while a starship capable of wiping out a civilization hangs around nearby.
  • In "A Taste of Armageddon", Kirk is taken hostage by the people of Eminar, and obtains his release by ordering the implementation of General Order 24 in two hours: destruction of any city, military structure, and evidence or hint that something on the target planet may have the ability to tickle the ships' shields, and Eminar's anti-orbit weapons had precisely that effect. He then ends the Forever War between the people of Eminar and the neighbouring Vendikar by destroying the computers that calculate what effect the attacks would have on the enemy and order people to disintegration chambers (that's why they try to destroy the Enterprise: the computers had calculated the Enterprise would have been destroyed as collateral damage), thus forcing both sides to engage in peace talks rather than restart actual war.
  • In Star Trek: Voyager, Janeway is not afraid to more or less punch her way through the Delta Quadrant, but she usually tries talking first. In the episode "Juggernaut", for example, B'Elanna complains about having to work with the Malon, who dump toxic waste in open space, and that Janeway's solution is always diplomacy. Earlier in the episode? Janeway telling the Malon they could help her fix their doomed ship or she would beam them back onto their escape pod, which was inside the blast radius. In Janeway's defense, she's operating several light-millennia outside Starfleet's jurisdiction, so it's understandable why she'd want to maintain a strong and intimidating hand in every alien encounter. As depicted in the below incident where Voyager encounters the Lokirrim, who don't like holograms (they're facing an AI hologram rebellion).
    Janeway: Your sensors should confirm [our holodecks have] been deactivated.
    Lokirrim Captain: You're still required to submit to inspection.
    Janeway: Your sensors should also confirm that our weapons are ready to fire. We're both reasonable people. I suggest a compromise. Your vessel will escort us through Lokirrim territory. That way, you can keep an eye on us, make sure we don't reactivate our holodecks. The other alternative is, we destroy your ship.
    Lokirrim Captain: [suddenly looking a bit uncomfortable] Your proposal is acceptable. [transmission ends]
    Janeway: [sits back down in her chair] Sometimes diplomacy requires a little sabre-rattling. [Chakotay smirks] Begin long-range scans.
  • In Star Trek: Discovery, this trope gets worked a few different ways in the series pilot. T'Kuvma, a Klingon leader attempting to rally the Empire against the Federation, argues that the Federation uses their peaceful exploration gimmick as a means to subvert and assimilate other races without having to fight them. Sarek notes that the Vulcans had previously gained the Klingons' respect by demonstrating that they were willing to engage them in battle, and when faced with a Klingon fleet gathering on the edge of Federation space, Starfleet rallies their own fleet of ships to face off with them before offering to talk things out peacefully (the Klingons don't trust the Federation's intentions, and a large space battle and an interstellar war promptly ensues).
  • In the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Captain Pike has the Enterprise reveal itself in the sky above the capital of a pre-warp civilization who managed to build a warp bomb by observing a classified battle that had taken place about one lightyear away from their planet through their telescopes. It brings the planet's government and La Résistance together for the first time in centuries. While this is a blatant disregard of General Order 1/The Prime Directive, Admiral April makes sure that Pike is not court-martialed because a trial would require declassifying that the classified battle took place, which Starfleet does not want to do.
• In The Sopranos episode "Whitecaps", a real estate agent refuses to do business with Tony, so he has some of his men park a boat next to the agent's beach house and play loud music.
• A fairly common tactic in Babylon 5:
  • Happens all over the place in "A Voice in the Wilderness, Part 1 & Part 2", with over a half-dozen races (including Earth and a previously unknown race) all pulling this at once when some very powerful, very advanced technology is discovered buried beneath the planet that the station orbits. After a brief, inconclusive battle, the planet itself, now acting through its new caretaker, Draal, informs all parties that none of them can have exclusive control of the planet, and that any who approach without permission will be destroyed. The ship belonging to the previously unknown race ignores the warning and promptly gets ventilated.
  • And subverted in "Rumors, Bargains, and Lies", when Sheridan orders the Rangers to attack and destroy some random asteroids. The League races know that the White Stars have far superior sensors to anything they have, and thus assume that they were fighting an invisible enemy. Sheridan does nothing to make them question this assumption, and welcomes them into a new military alliance.
  • A common accusation is the invitation for Earth to join the Interstellar Alliance happened during the end of the rebellion, and included dozens of advance warships doing a flyover of the capital.
• Andromeda: The whole reason why the High Guard had such fancy and overly powerful warships designed by now extinct Vedrans was so the High Guard could flaunt their unimaginable destructive potential and deter belligerent species from hostilities during negotiations. Usually these were discussions that involved joining the Commonwealth either by free will or with the guns of a mile long warship that looks like an Italian-sportscar-in-space trained on them. The XMC class or Glorious Heritage-class heavy cruisers like the Andromeda Ascendant were built for exactly this purpose. They were the diplomatic flagships of the Commonwealth that usually operated without a task force for extended periods of time. The stupid amounts of firepower and the ability to crack an M-class planet like an egg in only a few minutes and a legion of lancers gave the High Guard captain a pretty good bargaining position. XMC heavy cruisers were also used for long-range exploration because of this capability.
  • Of particular note is that in the post-Commonwealth dark age Captain Dylan Hunt frequently has to resort to gunboat diplomacy when dealing with the various planetary factions or powers he ends up dealing with.
    Dylan: Andromeda, how long do you think it would take you to depopulate this world?
    Rommie: About sixteen minutes.
  • Also happens when Dylan is backing Prince Erik for the throne of Ne'Holland against the corrupt barons:
    Erik: Our entire defense fleet?
    Dylan: Rommie, how long would it take for you to destroy that fleet?
    Rommie: 6.2 seconds.
    Dylan: That long?
  • This didn't do much good against the Pyrians, whose ships were at least a match for the Glorious Heritage class. Also, unlike the Commonwealth, the Pyrians never went anywhere.

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