Source of book: borrowed from the library.
This book is simultaneously well written, informative, thoroughly researched and supported by evidence….and depressing as hell.
The basic idea: The United States has a history over 100 years long of overthrowing foreign governments. This has been driven mostly by economic factors - the desire to protect profits of large corporations - and the desire to project military and political power overseas. In other words, Empire. The United States also has been incredibly self-delusional, telling itself that these “regime change” actions were inspired by the noblest motives, and were for the good of the nations we messed around with.
Also clear from this book (and subsequent history after it was written): The United States has pretty universally made every country it has effected “regime change” in worse in the long run, and in some cases, has wrecked entire regions and inspired anti-American sentiment around the globe.
Yeah, depressing.
Some personal history here. I was a naive and optimistic 25 year old, recently married, when 9-11 happened. I was all too ready for the US to go to war at first. I was not alone in this, of course: it seemed that a large majority of Americans of both major political parties were all in. The voices against were small and were not able to stop the juggernaut that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan became.
I have since learned a lot. Much of it by watching the events unfold over the last 22 years, but also by a determined effort to learn more about our world and our history, with the goal of better understanding why these wars failed. I’ll mention in particular A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin as an excellent and detailed look at the history of the Middle East - the events and decisions that set up the world we live in today. I also read magazine articles spanning a significant time frame, looking into the facts that seem to never have entered public consciousness.
Eventually, having read the CIA report on the coup in Iran, I ran across a reference to this book, and decided to add it to my list. I actually started reading this back in the summer, but another library patron requested it, and I ended up waiting a couple months to get it back.
The book was published back in 2006, and covers the time frame from our first “regime change” war - the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 - through the most recent (and catastrophic) wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obviously, Kinzer wrote long before our withdrawal from the latter, and before the rise of ISIS in the former. To put it mildly, Kinzer knew things were fucked up, but he had no way of knowing just how FUBAR everything was in both countries.
It all started with Hawaii and the Dole corporation. In retrospect, while the outcome for native Hawaiians was less than idea, Hawaii actually had one of the least bad outcomes of countries we messed with. It hasn’t gone through decades of civil war, its infrastructure wasn’t destroyed, it wasn’t taken over by thuggish gangs or brutal dictators. So, success?
From there, though, things look a lot less rosy. The Philippines remains one of the most unstable countries in the world, seemingly doomed to rule by corrupt kleptocrats despite attempts at establishing more stable governance.
Latin America has been a mess, Iran became a dangerous and brutal theocracy, Cuba fell to the Communists, and Vietnam….well, we all know what happened there.
The saddest part about all of this is that in so many cases - Iran, Nicaragua, Chile, Cuba and others - the countries were trending toward liberal democracy. This was problematic for the US, because the peoples of these countries, given a voice, wanted to end the economic exploitation by US companies. This was anathema to the US government, so we went in and fucked places up. As I said, totally depressing.
And, in the case of Iran, we can trace nearly every issue in today’s Middle East to our decision to overthrow a progressive democracy, and, in the process, fund and arm Islamic fundamentalists. Sigh.
I’ll also note that through much of this history, the Cold War dominated the thinking of politicians, even though the evidence was and remains clear that the left-leaning nationalist democracies we overthrew were not a threat, and were not the result of Soviet meddling. This book thoroughly documents that.
Unfortunately, I have found it extremely difficult to discuss any of these truths with people from my parents’ generation. Most - even the more progressive ones - are still stuck in a Cold War mindset. Even (to use an example) the CIA coup in Iran is essentially reduced to “whatever we did, the Soviets were….” So we were apparently justified and need never take responsibility for the fact that the United States created the anti-American sentiment and indeed so much else that continues to cause us trouble today. We did this to ourselves.
There is far too much in this book to summarize beyond that, but I took a lot of notes on likes that I think are illuminating. Let’s start with the opening of the introduction.
Why does a strong nation strike against a weaker one? Usually because it seeks to impose its ideology, increase its power, or gain control of valuable resources. Shifting combinations of these three factors motivated the United States as it extended its global reach over the past century and more. This book examines the most direct form of American intervention, the overthrow of foreign governments.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not an isolated episode. It was the culmination of a 110-year period in which Americans overthrew fourteen governments that displeased them for various ideological, political, and economic reasons. Like each of these operations, the “regime change” in Iraq seemed for a time - a very short time - to have worked. It is clear, however, that this operation has had terrible unintended consequences. So have most of the other coups, revolutions, and invasions that the United States has mounted to depose governments it feared or mistrusted.
And this:
This set a pattern. Throughout the twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first, the United States repeatedly used its military power, and that of its clandestine services, to overthrow governments that refused to protect American interests. Each time, it cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric of national security and liberation. In most cases, however, it acted mainly for economic reasons - specifically, to establish, promote, and defend the right of Americans to do business around the world without interference.
This belief in American superiority and missionary project came at the beginning, and was rooted in a belief in white supremacy. The advocates for American expansionism were explicit about this.
They and others of like mind laid out their case in different ways. Some argued that the United States had to take new territories in order to prevent European powers, or perhaps even Japan, from taking them. Others stressed the missionary aspect of colonialism, the obligation of more “advanced” races to civilize the world.
President McKinley, in explaining how he decided to annex the Philippines expressly said that God told him it was our duty to Christianize the Filipinos.
More broadly, Kinzer points out that Americans have a generous side, which is why they have “time and again…proved willing to support foreign interventions that are presented as missions to rescue less fortunate people.”
But these were mostly the pretexts. The driving force was in nearly every case the need to find markets for US goods, and resources to extract and bring to the US.
In the case of the Philippines, the overthrow of the government led to a bloody civil war. As the book chillingly states, the US would set a pattern in how it ended these conflicts.
Filipinos remember those years as some of the bloodiest in their history. Americans quickly forgot that the war ever happened.
Go in, fuck things up, then pretend it never happened.
Nicaragua is also a depressing story. The book grabs attention by noting that a postage stamp set off a chain of events. I won’t try to recount them all, but Nicaragua was on a trajectory toward becoming a modern and increasingly wealthy nation. The problem was, United Fruit stood in the way. Nationalism as expressed in so many of these stories, was all about ending the exploitation by these giant multinational corporations. But once a political leader dared seek to claw back those profits, the US took him out.
For all his faults, Zelaya was the greatest statesman Nicaragua ever produced. If the United States had found a way to deal with him, it might have avoided the disasters that followed. Instead, it crushed a leader who embraced capitalist principles more fully than any Central American of his era.
That terrible miscalculation drew the United States into a century of interventions in Nicaragua. They took a heavy toll in blood and treasure, profoundly damaged America’s image in the world, and helped keep generations of Nicaraguans in misery.
But, the big three fruit companies ended up owning nearly everything of value in Central America - nearly all the arable land, the ports, power plants, mills, banks…so I guess they won.
The book also notes that Central American gangs such as MS13 can be directly traced to this era. While the US continued to intervene in nasty ways (see: Iran Contra Affair), thousands of children ended up as refugees. Largely unaided, it is no surprise that some of them got involved in street gangs here, and later imported that culture to their home countries when they were deported.
Somehow, these actions did not endear the US to other countries and their people. One huge case in point is Cuba. After the US deposed an elected leader and imposed a constitution on the island that gave the US all the power, it was shocked, shocked to discover that Cubans hated us. Who knew?
Castro was a pure product of American policy toward Cuba. If the United States had not crushed Cuba’s drive to independence in the early twentieth century, if it had not supported a series of repressive dictators there, and if it had not stood by while the 1952 election was canceled, a figure like Castro would almost certainly not have emerged. His regime is the quintessential result of a “regime change” operation gone wrong, one that comes back to haunt the country that sponsored it.
The reference to the 1952 election is important. Castro was an up-and-coming politician who was at that time, not a Communist. He looked poised to win a seat in the legislature, and clearly wanted to work within the system to reform governance. But the election was canceled by the US-supported regime, and Castro had to look outside the system for a way forward. Communism and Soviet support looked like the best option. (Remember this idea: it will drive not only Communism but fundamentalist Islam - as the most viable alternative to American exploitation.)
Cuba too was considered an exploitable country - a handful of US corporations owned most of the land. I keep mentioning this because it is a theme that runs through the book. The third rail was the profits of the big corporations. Political leaders were unable and unwilling to stand up to the corporate interests, and instead came to see the interests of America as synonymous with them.
Expansion presented the United States with a dilemma that has confronted many colonial powers. If it allowed democracy to flower in the countries it controlled, those nations would begin acting in accordance with their own interests, rather than the interests of the United States, and American influence over them would diminish. Establishing that influence, though, was the reason the United States had intervened in those countries in the first place. Americans had to choose between permitting them to become democracies or maintaining power over them. It was an easy choice.
The case of Cuba is definitely one of “what if?” What if, instead of economic exploitation and the propping up of dictators, the US had supported Cuban self-determination? What if Castro had remained a centrist politician and become an ally?
Even more so, though, is the case of Iran. I intend to read Kinzer’s other book, All the Shaw’s Men, sometime. In this book, he covers the Iranian coup pretty quickly, and doesn’t include some information that the CIA only recently released, showing how much more the US did to foment radical Islamic terrorism and destroy the political infrastructure of Iran.
As a result, anti-Americanism, which hadn’t been significant in Iran, came to dominate the entire region. Supreme Court justice William Douglas may have put it best:
“When Mossadegh and Persia started basic reforms, we became alarmed. We united with the British to destroy him; we succeeded; and ever since, our name has not been an honored one in the Middle East.”
But here is the what if: what if Iran had continued as a centrist democracy? What if BP had been forced to share the oil wealth on the same terms as other oil agreements in the area? What if radical Islam had been marginalized as irrelevant, rather than encouraged? What if Iran had become a strong ally, rather than the wellspring of anti-Americanism it became? Would Afghanistan then been able to stabilize? While there is plenty of blame to the Allies after WWI and their ludicrous partition of the Middle East, the Iranian Coup destabilized what was finally sorting itself out, and set the tone for the next 75 and counting of anti-Western agitation, religious fanaticism, terrorism, and unrest. What if?
Guatemala had a lot in common with Iran, it turns out, and after World War Two, they became the first in a series of nations that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles decided to overthrow. Dulles, along with Barry Goldwater, functioned as two of the greatest villains in 20th Century America, responsible for much of the damage done to the world and to American interests. In the case of Dulles, that his religious fundamentalism gave cover to his deep involvement in corporate interests - he literally worked for both corporate organizations and the government at the same time - is unsurprising but still deeply disappointing. This is, unfortunately, the sort of syncretistic religion that masquerades as “Christianity” in this country.
Arbenz took office in 1951, the same year another nationalist, Mohammad Mossadegh, became prime minister of Iran. Each assumed leadership of a wretchedly poor nation that was just beginning to enjoy the blessings of democracy. Each challenged the power of a giant foreign-owned company. The company howled in protest, and charged that the government was Communistic. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles agreed.
In the case of Iran, it was a subsidiary of British Petroleum. (Ironically, the Brits got screwed over by the Americans, who used the overthrow of Mossadegh to seize half of the profits from Iranian oil. The Brits would have been better off just negotiating with Mossadegh…)
For Guatemala, it was our old friend United Fruit. Which wanted to operate without restraint the way giant corporations always seek to operate.
During the first half of the twentieth century, United Fruit made great profits in Guatemala because it was able to operate without interference from the Guatemalan government. It simply claimed good farmland, arranged for legal title through one-sided deals with dictators, and then operated plantations on its own terms, free of such annoyances as taxes or labor regulations. As long as that system prevailed, men like John Foster Dulles considered Guatemala a “friendly” and “stable” country. When a new kind of government emerged there and began to challenge the company, they disapproved.
I was kind of surprised (although I shouldn’t have been) to discover that Howard Hunt was involved in the coup in Guatemala - he later became infamous for Watergate. Anyway, he had the idea of using the Catholic Church to stir up unrest. Kind of like how Putin has used American white churches to stir up hate here in the US. It is easy to see why this was successful - why religious figures were all too willing to help.
Catholic priests and bishops in Guatemala, as in other Latin American countries, were closely aligned with the ruling class, and they loathed reformers like Arbenz.
By the way, even though he proved powerless to stop the coup, Guatemala’s foreign minister, Guillermo Toriello saw right through the US claim that “communism” was threatening the country. His quote is spot-on.
“The plan of national liberation being carried out with firmness by my government has necessarily affected the privileges of foreign enterprises that are impeding the progress and economic development of the country…They wanted to find a ready expedient to maintain the economic dependence of the American Republics and suppress the legitimate desires of their peoples, cataloging as “communism” every manifestation of nationalism or economic independence, any desire for social progress, any intellectual curiosity, and any interest in liberal and progressive reforms.”
Hey, that bit about “cataloging as ‘communism’ any desire for social progress, any intellectual curiosity, and any interest in liberal and progressive reforms” is literally what the Right Wing does here in the US today! Funny how that works…
And then there is the truly sad part about all of this.
By overthrowing him, the United States crushed a democratic experiment that held great promise for Latin America. As in Iran a year earlier, it deposed a regime that embraced fundamental American ideals but that had committed the sin of seeking to retake control of its own natural resources.
Kinzer is not exaggerating about those fundamental American ideals. So many of these unfortunate statesmen literally quoted the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and promoted true American values. But….they stood in the way of money. In the contest between ideals and money, guess what won?
How about another missed opportunity? Did you know that Ho Chi Minh quoted the Declaration of Independence when Vietnam declared its independence from the French? Or that Minh tried to enlist American support against the French? Or that China and the Soviets were terrified of him because he was not on their side?
Oh, we don’t hear that taught in schools, do we?
The fact is that the US blew a huge chance in Vietnam during the Truman and Eisenhower years. Ho Chi Minh could have been an ally, Vietnam could have become a capitalist democracy, and our most embarrassing ass-kicking could have been prevented.
This was just the start of one of the stupidest shit-shows ever. Dulles snubbed the Chinese during negotiations for the French withdrawal. This led to the partition. There were several chances to reunify Vietnam under favorable (to democracy) terms before war became inevitable. And also after the war had started but before it escallated.
Instead, the US installed a puppet, then engineered a coup against him. I mean, WTF? Well, the reason is pretty clear.
Diem was the American surrogate. Lacking a popular base, plucked from a religious group that represented only 10 percent of his country’s population, surrounded by a venal family and uninterested in the daily work of government, he was chosen because no one else fit American requirements. As in so many other countries, the Americans looked in South Vietnam for a leader who would be a crowd-pleasing nationalist and also do what Washington wished, only to discover that they could not have both.
At every turn, the US made terrible decisions, driven by a combination of Cold War thinking, gross ignorance of foreign culture and politics, and greed for a possible economic advantage. And of course by an innate distrust that brown-skinned people can govern themselves.
That’s how you get an embarrassing military defeat. My parents and their generation of conservatives continue to believe that “we just didn’t use enough force to win.” Which is a whole other discussion - the way the Right Wing insists that enough force will solve any problem (see: mass incarceration and authoritarian parenting as well here), despite, well, all of human history to the contrary. Vietnam was never winnable, at least the way the US wanted to win it. But what if? What if Ho Chi Minh had gotten help when he needed it? Vietnam as an ally? It could have happened.
Oh god, and then we get to Chile. What the fuck were we thinking?
Chile was an ally, a country that embraced American values. Kennedy and Johnson poured investment into Chile, but Nixon changed course. Why? But, money. It’s always money, isn’t it?
Chile had two sources of wealth for US corporations. One was the copper mining industry. The other was the Chilean telephone company. Both had extracted incredible sums of money - at huge profit margins - for decades. When Chile’s newly elected president and legislature determined to nationalize the companies, thus returning the right to profit to the Chilean people, the corporations convinced Nixon to step in and foment a coup.
And that’s how we got the brutal and corrupt Pinochet. We did that to the Chilean people.
There is a quote by Nixon that I think is interesting. This is from a meeting of the National Security Council.
“I will never agree with the policy of downgrading the military in Latin America. They are power centers subject to our influence. The others, the intellectuals, are not subject to our influence.”
Actually, you will see this anywhere corporate power is present. A distrust of the “intellectuals” - those who think - in favor of people with weapons, who are easier to control.
In the chapter summing up the aftermath of these coups the US fomented, Kinzer expresses what I think is not merely a pithy summary of Cold War thinking, but the fundamental error the United States made for an entire era of our history. And, to a large degree, continues to make.
John Foster Dulles, Henry Kissinger, and others who shaped United States foreign policy during the Cold War were utterly uninterested in the details of life in individual countries, and cared not the slightest whether the regimes that ruled them were dictatorships, democracies, or something in between. Their world was defined by a single fact, the Cold War confrontation between Moscow and Washington. Nations existed for them not as entities with unique histories, cultures, and challenges, but as battlegrounds in a global life-or-death struggle. All that mattered was how vigorously each country supported the United States and opposed the Soviet Union.
It truly is a breathtakingly narcissistic view of the world.
It also has borne incredibly toxic fruit in the decades since - fruit that continues to poison our world.
Operation Success taught Cuban revolutionaries - and those from many other countries - that the United States would not accept democratic nationalism in Latin America. It gave them a decisive push toward radicalism. They resolved that once in power, they would not work with existing institutions, as Arbenz had done. Instead they would abolish the army, close Congress, decapitate the landholding class, and expel foreign-owned corporations.
After this period of fomenting coups, the US eventually moved on to full-scale invasions. This started with Genada - the very first conflict I remember as a child. After that, we moved on to Panama, before enmeshing ourselves in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I learned something in this section that I was surprised about. For many, many reasons, I loathe the late senator (and open white supremacist and religious bigot) Jesse Helms. So it was surprising to find myself agreeing with him about something. He was one of the early legislators to insist on looking into Manuel Noriega and his stream of payments from the CIA.
Now, to be clear, I do not think that the coup that took Noriega out was a great idea, or that it actually improved things. Rather, it is stupid that we were sending him money and propping him up in the first place. So, points to Helms.
I would say that of the modern invasions, the two that were the most morally murky were Grenada and Panama, and not because invasion was necessary, but because Noriega and his counterpart in Grenada were horrible, brutal people. For Grenada, the issue more is that the dictator who murdered his predecessor probably would have been taken out by his own people without our aid, and our intervention made things worse while harming our own reputation as Americans. For Noriega, as I noted, it was the stupid stuff we did earlier that kept Noriega in power.
The book ends with the two modern invasions, the central wars of my own adult life. And, man, did we fuck up badly on these two. I’ve already touched on the bad stuff that happened after Kinzer wrote this book, but what is already in there shows how laughably ignorant George W. Bush was, how much he was driven by an obsession with Iraq, and how many dissenting voices were ignored.
Kinzer backs up a few decades, however, to look at what led to 9/11 and before that to the unrest in Afghanistan. It is difficult to speculate exactly what would have become of the country had foreign powers left it alone. It could well be that it would still be backwards and impoverished and unstable. But it is impossible to conclude that the US interventions over the years did anything positive whatsoever.
Again, the Cold War led to the US seeing Afghanistan as just another pawn in the battle against the Soviets, and didn’t bother to consider the future. Which is how the US ended up giving weapons and training to fanatical Islamic terrorist groups - the groups that would eventually become the dominant force in most of the Middle East. This isn’t to say that the USSR was smart - they were terminally stupid and harmed their own interests in a huge way. But the US was, if anything, even stupider.
At around the same time Andropov was addressing his Politiburo in Moscow, the CIA came up with its first plan to aid Afghan guerrillas. This was the beginning of what would become by far the largest and most expensive operation in CIA history. Some consider it to have been a spectacular success. Others believe that in light of subsequent events, what seemed at first like a victory for the United States looks more like a catastrophe.
As a secular Afghan wrote at the time, “For God’s sake, you’re financing your own assassins!”
And, as we now know, we did the improbable: we turned the Taliban from an unpopular government into the dominant force in Afghan politics. That….wasn’t a win.
Whatever the hell we did there during our occupation of 20 years - TWENTY YEARS! - it collapsed within days, leaving the Taliban back in power and stronger than ever.
Iraq hasn’t been in the news much lately, which either means things have settled down a bit, or more likely that Americans are already trying their best to forget we ever invaded. But of all our adventures in foreign policy during my lifetime, this one seems the most puzzling.
The story of the Iraq war is, and probably will forever be, enveloped in a single one-word question: Why? …The fact that there is so much debate and uncertainty about these motives makes the Iraq war unique in American history. It is the only conflict Americans ever fought without truly knowing why.
And the other question, of course: What was the plan? Because other than fucking a bunch of stuff up and removing Saddam Hussain, we really had no plan, which is why things eventually went FUBAR. Remember “Mission Accomplished”? Yeah, that lasted what? Two weeks?
Kinzer does a good job of tying Iraq to Vietnam, and the desire to redeem the humiliation of that loss. And also to the belief that Vietnam was lost, not because it was an unwinnable war, but because we simply didn’t use enough violence. In an interesting insight, Kinzer also mentions Texas culture, which produced Bush.
Even more than most Americans, Texans absorb a sense that good men with guns can bring order out of chaos.
This is a core American myth, perpetuated by media and culture, that has cost Americans so much. From our mass shootings to our mass incarceration to…these sorts of lost wars.
As noted above, this is also expressed in our addiction to authoritarian parenting and seeming allergy to curiosity about the root causes of poverty and crime and unrest.
Instead, a desire for knowledge of the underlying realities that other people live in has been subsumed by an ignorance and arrogance that makes these mistakes inevitable. And this applies from McKinley to Bush, in between and beyond.
Neither man was troubled by his ignorance of the countries whose governments he overthrew. McKinley admitted he had only a vague idea of where to find the Philippines on a map. Bush explained his certainty that the invasion of Iraq would go well by saying, “I rely on my instincts.” Both were deeply religious men imbued with the conviction that humanity is locked in a constant struggle between good and evil. Both believed that God was guiding them and that therefore they did not need to ponder abstruse questions of culture and identity before ordering the overthrow of foreign regimes.
If you want to know why even some of us more religious folks are deeply opposed to the unholy marriage of church and state, this is one reason. Religion can function to absolve one of the duty to think or learn. It makes one feel righteous even when one is dead wrong.
One thing this book draws out so well is that all these good intentions - “civilizing the savages,” “freeing oppressed people” or whatever the justification of the day is - hasn’t led to good results. It is no mystery why not.
A century of American “regime change” operations has shown that the United States is singularly unsuited to ruling foreign lands. Americans never developed either the imperial impulse or the attention span that allowed the Spanish, British, French, and others to seize foreign lands and run them for decades or centuries.
We lose interest as soon as we aren’t blowing shit up. While I will never be a defender of colonialism, the US seems to be taking the worst and most stupid path. Neither willing to leave well enough alone, nor willing to invest the time, energy, effort, and money to fix things after breaking them, the US has left a trail of wreckage behind it for the last century and a quarter.
So much of this is due to willful ignorance, honestly. History is there to be studied, but we have refused to do so. Not that we are the only ones, of course. Israel right now seems hell-bent on repeating their catastrophic occupation of Lebanon in the 80s and 90s in Gaza. The US invasion of Iraq went about as well as the 1920 British invasion of the same country. What was expected to last a few months dragged into 35 years, followed by a power vacuum that eventually produced Saddam. As Niall Ferguson pointed out, “What happened in Iraq so closely resembles the events of 1920 that only a historical ignoramus can be surprised.”
We fail to learn because we refuse to learn. And we refuse to learn because we think we know it all.
There is no stronger or more persistent strain in the American character than the belief that the United States is a nation uniquely endowed with virtue. Americans consider themselves to be, in Herman Melville’s words, “a peculiar, chosen people, the Israel of our times.” In a nation too new to define itself by real or imagined historical triumphs, and too diverse to be bound together by a shared religion or ethnicity, this belief became the essence of national identity, the conviction that bound Americans together and defined their approach to the world. They are hardly the first people to believe themselves favored by Providence, but they are the only ones in modern history who are convinced that by bringing their political and economic system to others, they are doing God’s work.
Kinzer goes on to note that Americans believe that capitalism is ordained by God, and that our style of representative government is likewise the only possible good way of living. I would add that this applies to culture and so much else. We are a most arrogant nation and people.
It would be one thing if our adventures in regime change had actually made things better for us. “Sure, it hurt other countries and their people, but at least….” But it didn’t.
Most American-sponsored “regime change” operations have, in the end, weakened rather than strengthened American security. They have produced generations of militants who are deeply and sometimes violently anti-American; expanded the borders that the United States feels obligated to defend, thereby increasing the number of enemies it must face and drawing it ever more deeply into webs of foreign entanglement; and emboldened enemies of the United States by showing that despite its awesome power, it has a soft and vulnerable underbelly.
Near the end of the book, Kinzer really sums up the long-term results, and proposes that the blunt force of “regime change” is far inferior to the slower methods of influence. I was truly struck by how much of a parallel there is here to other areas: dealing with crime, reducing violence, and raising children. The easy way out for a stronger party, whether it be a government, an army, or a parent, is to use one’s superior strength against the weaker party. The more difficult, but ultimately more effective way is that of understanding, compromise, mutuality, and the common good.
I’ll quote a bit at length here.
The history of this period, however, shows that military power, even combined with political and economic power, is not enough to bend the will of nations. In almost every case, overthrowing the government of a foreign country has, in the end, led both that country and the United States to grief.
Too often, “regime change” operations have been simply a substitute for thoughtful foreign policy. In most cases, diplomatic and political approaches would have worked far more effectively. They are subtler, more difficult to design, and take longer to bear fruit, but they do not plunge nations into violence and do not drive millions of people to resent the United States.
Kinzer further notes that when we have engaged threatening and oppressive regimes with these softer measures, we have tended to defuse the threats. And then there are the others:
Nations the United States confronts only with threats and pressures, and isolates from the international system, like Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, never emerge from their cocoons of repression and anti-Americanism.
I’ll end with this thought:
Deft combinations of measures to build civil society, strengthen free enterprise, promote trade, and encourage diplomatic solutions to international problems have worked wonders in many countries. These measures require patience, willingness to compromise, and recognition that all nations have legitimate interests, including security interests. They are most effective when they are the product of global consensus. Because the United States is not always patient and not always willing to compromise, recognize other countries’ interests, or work on an equal basis with other nations, it impulsively turns to the option of forcible “regime change.” Driven by shifting combinations of frustration, anger, and fear, it lashes out in ways that bring quick satisfaction but often create problems greater than the ones it seems to resolve.
While this book is, as I said, depressing, it is also one to learn from. The lessons apply beyond foreign policy too. I have been thinking about this a lot as my children transition to adulthood: children too need to have their legitimate interests recognized and respected. Applying threats and force and pressure will have less and less effect (and no positive effect) as children grow up. If we parents act like the US all too often has, and just blow shit up when our kids chose to act in their own best interest, not ours, we will be left with the same destruction and ultimately end up worse off than we were.
Patience, mutuality, equality, and the common good. It’s not just for individuals anymore..
Any student of history will find this book fascinating. And, the sooner we let go of our belief in the idol of American Exceptionalism, the sooner we can honestly evaluate our past and present policies and work toward better ones.
Perhaps the words of The Eagles are the best final thought:
Weaving down the American highway
Through the litter and the wreckage and the cultural junk
Bloated with entitlement, loaded on propaganda
Now we're driving dazed and drunk
Been down the road to Damascus, the road to Mandalay
Met the ghost of Caesar on the Appian way
He said, "It's hard to stop this binging once you get a taste
But the road to empire is a bloody stupid waste"
Behold the bitten apple, the power of the tools
But all the knowledge in the world is of no use to fools
And it's a long road out of Eden…
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