If he had done that to protect Danish ships flagged in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands.......
Irrelevant. Point is that foreign policy actions don’t require a giant bureaucracy.
You might want to read up on the history of U.S. trade and the predations of the Barbary States in the Mediterranean Sea.
The U.S. had an immediate problem with them as soon as we became an independent nation. The British government made it known across the world that they no longer had any obligation to protect our merchant ships. Under the Articles of Confederation, the Federal government was so weak that it couldn’t effectively manage a navy to deal with problems like the Barbary States thousands of miles away. This situation went on for years, even after the Constitution was ratified and Congress had the authority to fund a navy. During that time, the U.S. government was paying tribute to the Barbary pirates because we simply didn’t have the “bureaucracy” in place to deal with them.