Gunboat Diplomacy / Literature

• The Howard Taylor novel Show Of Force starts off as this by both sides over a missile deployment in the Indian Ocean and ends up turning into a full-scale naval battle.
• Jack Ryan:
  • In The Bear And The Dragon, attack subs are maneuvering near the Chinese coast long before hostilities begin, along with naval ships anchored in Taiwan, and Executive Orders has a premier tank squadron training in the Negev desert just before the UIR's invasion of its neighbors. Debt Of Honor subverts the whole thing by having the US and Japan conduct a joint training mission, and then having the Japanese navy doing the equivalent of cold-cocking the American forces returning to Pearl Harbor.
  • Considered, but not actually implemented in Rainbow Six, where the Rainbow troops were considering making their existence public just to intimidate the terrorists into keeping their heads down.
• The New Republic did this to the Hutts in the Star Wars Expanded Universe novel Darksaber.
  • And in The Thrawn Trilogy, Thrawn in the Chimera would, ah, persuade neutral worlds to support the Empire.
    • Followed up by the Big Bad Triumvirate in the Hand of Thrawn duology.
  • The Empire liked this. There's something called the "Tarkin Doctrine", which basically goes that it's better to rule by fear of force than force itself. A planet that surrenders without a fight gives its resources fully intact. On the other hand, the Empire is decidedly not bluffing about actually following through on their threats, and any resistance (even non-violent resistance) will be put down brutally to make sure everyone knows they're not bluffing.
  • Threatened to happen in Starfighters of Adumar. Both the Empire and the New Republic were trying to win over a neutral world, and both had beforehand signed treaties stating that if they were not the favored party, they would withdraw all forces for three days and not return except under "formal banners of truce or war". The Empire intended to ignore that if it came to it, but the Imperial in charge hated being ordered to break his word so much that the New Republic ambassador, Wedge Antilles, was able to talk him out of it. Thus, the Imperial admiral sent his ship back on a route that would take 3 days to reach the capital, and locked down its holocomm systems so that even if his orders were disobeyed they'd have no way of delivering a message except by shuttlecraft, and left a message announcing his resignation from the Imperial Navy while he stayed behind on Adumar.
• One of the space ships in Iain M. Banks's Culture novels is actually named Gunboat Diplomat. The Culture are rather good at doing this, albeit in a subtle way, too - their enormous General Systems Vehicles leisurely cruise their way around the galaxy, showing other civilisations the many wonders of the Culture... And also providing a pointed reminder as to just how powerful their society really is - if you repeatedly get in their way, and ignore them when they ask you nicely to stop doing so, you will be destroyed.
• The final book in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series features two Human spaceships dispatched to the homeworld of the lizard-like aliens known as The Race. The first is the Admiral Peary which is close in capability to the conventional sub-lightspeed sleeper ships The Race themselves use, and was sent to negotiate a peace deal on equal terms. The second is the Commodore Perry. Its purpose is to negotiate on less equal terms. The fact that the Commodore Perry is an FTL-capable ship that took only six weeks to get from Earth to Tau Ceti—something that The Race firmly believed was technologically impossible—ends up scaring The Race more than the fact that the ship is also a full-scale nuclear launch platform. Even if they managed to destroy the ship, the humans would just send another that could attack as soon as it arrived in orbit in a matter of weeks, as opposed to decades.
• Vorkosigan Saga:
  • Aral Vorkosigan pulls a clever reversal of this; he draws up a list of a neighbouring polity's top five requested diplomatic concessions and suggests it as an agenda for a summit. The diplomacy, in this case, is purely so that he can get his gunboat closer to where he suspects the action will take place. He's right, and it results in one hell of a Gunship Rescue moment.
  • 'Diplomatic Immunity' is an interesting inversion of the trope: the gunships have been impounded, and the main character has to diplomatically mediate between his ferocious military subordinates and the peaceful natives who see them as barbarians.
  • Pierre Le Sanguinerre was the warleader for Emperor Dorca who carried out such things on recalcitrant vor.
• Star Trek Expanded Universe:
  • In Star Trek: Articles of the Federation, United Federation of Planets President Bacco resorts to this when overseeing negotiations between the Carreon and the Deltans. The Deltans require a new water reclamation system for their planet, and the Carreon have the design they need. Because of an old feud, however, the Carreon refuse to negotiate properly. Bacco ends up using the implied threat of Federation military strength to stop the Carreon from messing the Deltans around. As she tells the Carreon Ambassador, diplomacy is the means by which conflict is avoided. If Carrea won't negotiate in good faith, the only remaining option is war- and she makes it clear Carrea wouldn't stand a chance.
  • The novel The Romulan Way includes this in the second attempt at contacting the Rihannsu (Romulans), as the Federation had sent the starship Balboa with the Stone Mountain in the general area ready to help. The Rihannsu, paranoid due previous experiences with aliens that faked pacific intentions before attacking, annihilated Balboa with fifty of the seven thousand small warships they had built in the three years since the first attempt at contact, and then captured Stone Mountain and started making crude copies of its warp drive and advanced weapons to fight the Earth-Romulan War.
    • The sequel Swordhunt had the Rihannsu asking to renegotiate the Neutral Zone with the negotiations to happen on a neutral ship provided by the nomadic Lalairu, and all parties engaged in this: the Federation shows up with a squadron of warships: four refit Constitution-class heavy cruisers including Enterprise (commanded by their old nemesis Kirk) and two new Constellation-class long-range cruisers, all commanded by one of the best and most aggressive commodores in Starfleet; the Rihannsu showed up with four heavy cruisers of a new class and two heavy cruisers of a bigger new class; the Lalairu sent the Mascrar, a colony ship that outgunned either task force.
• Retaking the Lone Islands with one ship in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
• This is standard policy for the Earth Federation when dealing with space-faring aliens in Mikhail Akhmanov's Trevelyan's Mission series. This is justified, as humanity's first (and many subsequent) encounters with aliens haven't exactly been on friendly terms. As such, all ambassadors are ferried by top-of-the-line cruisers. Then again, given that this 'verse has instant Casual Interstellar Travel, it's not that big a deal. The only time they did not do that is when a race of Technical Pacifists (who can somehow accurately predict possible futures using an advanced form of intuition) requested that no warships be present at negotiations.
• In Jingo Vetinari shoots down the suggestion that Ankh-Morpork sent a warship to Klatch for this purpose on the grounds that, firstly, that sort of thing is not done in modern diplomacy and, secondly, Ankh-Morpork doesn't have any warships.
• The Irregular at Magic High School has a familial example in volume 16. Clan head Maya says that Tatsuya is her son. This is bullshit and everybody knows it's bullshit, but Maya can laser-drill people, so the family accepts it.
• The Scholomance: The enclave war in the third book is actually a trap engineered by Ophelia for all of the most powerful enclaves in the world, in both the east and the west. She intends to bring Orion into the war so he can slaughter the eastern enclaves in front of everyone, ally and enemy alike, and use the display to cow them all into doing what she wants.