Perilous Partners: The Benefits and Pitfalls of America's Alliances with Authoritarian Regimes

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Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: WASHINGTON’S QUESTIONABLE COLD WAR ALLIES

1. UNCLE SAM’S BACKYARD: FRIENDLY LATIN AMERICAN STRONGMEN

2. CHIANG KAI-SHEK: AMERICA’S TROUBLESOME FREE WORLD CLIENT

3. A PREFERENCE FOR AUTHORITARIANS: WASHINGTON BACKS SOUTH KOREAN DICTATORS

4. FROM JINNAH TO JIHAD: WASHINGTON’S COLD WAR RELATIONS WITH PAKISTAN

5. COLD WAR TO HOLY WAR: THE U.S.-SAUDI ALLIANCE

6. SUBVERTING DEMOCRACY: SUPPORTING THE SHAH OF IRAN

7. NAVIGATING A QUAGMIRE: SUSTAINING SOUTH VIETNAMESE DICTATORS

8. HEART OF DARKNESS: U.S. POLICY TOWARD MOBUTU’S DICTATORSHIP IN ZAIRE

9. FLYING BLIND IN MANILA: ENABLING FERDINAND MARCOS

10. THE GOOD COMMUNISTS: TITO AND CEAUŞESCU

11. PLAYING THE CHINA CARD: STRATEGIC RAPPROCHEMENT WITH BEIJING

PART TWO: AMERICA’S AUTHORITARIAN PARTNERS AFTER 9/11

12. PYRAMID OF CARDS: WASHINGTON’S POLICY TOWARD EGYPT FROM MUBARAK TO EL-SISI

13. FROM GOLDEN CHAIN TO ARAB SPRING: THE SORDID TALE OF U.S.-SAUDI RELATIONS

14. JANUS-FACED PARTNERS: AMERICA AND PAKISTAN AFTER 9/11

15. TANGLED TRAILS OF THE SILK ROAD: WASHINGTON AND CENTRAL ASIA’S TYRANTS

16. CLOSING THE VALUES GAP: PROTECTING SECURITY, PRESERVING VALUES

NOTES

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Preface

As the United States assumed a global leadership role after World War II, a growing number of cases occurred in which policymakers established close working relationships with allies and security clients. Although such ties varied a great deal in terms of necessity or wisdom, they posed little problem from an ethical or moral standpoint when they involved democratic governments. Outside of Europe and portions of Latin America, East Asia, and Oceania, however, many of Washington’s new security partners were anything but democratic. Even worse, some of them had well-deserved reputations not only as corrupt kleptocracies, but also as egregious abusers of basic human rights.

That pattern persisted throughout the long decades of the Cold War. Washington valued its relationships with an assortment of cooperative authoritarian regimes, especially in the Third World. U.S. leaders defended the policy against criticism that such partnerships betrayed fundamental American values and made a mockery of the professed commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and individual liberty.

U.S. officials insisted that cooperation with friendly, but unsavory, regimes was necessary to protect America’s own security interests as well as block the expansion of international communism and the nightmare of totalitarianism that system would impose on vulnerable societies. One should not dismiss the extent of the fear that gripped the American foreign policy community and much of the American public during the Cold War. In some cases, the associations made sense from a security standpoint—at least in the short term. In others, the security rationale ranged from questionable to utterly inadequate.

Moreover, American policymakers and opinion leaders frequently went beyond offering a plea of regrettable necessity. Instead, they lavished praise on Washington’s autocratic allies and clients, insisting that such corrupt tyrants were noble members of the Free World. Even in retrospect, it is still sometimes difficult to determine whether U.S. leaders merely engaged in cynical disinformation or succumbed to their own propaganda and actually believed such portrayals.

Whatever the nature or legitimacy of the underlying motives, Washington’s support for brutal autocrats disillusioned and alienated populations around the world that groaned under the yoke of U.S.-sponsored dictatorships. When those oppressive regimes finally fell from power, the blowback against the United States varied in intensity. In some cases, such as with South Korea and the Philippines, the lingering resentment was relatively mild. In other cases, most notably Iran, it was virulent, and the animosity poisons bilateral relations to this day. Still other cases, such as Nicaragua, occupy a middle position along the blowback spectrum.

Some of the habits of forging close ties with authoritarian partners during the Cold War did not disappear even when the global rivalry with the Soviet Union ended. Other unhealthy behavioral patterns went into at least partial eclipse during the initial post–Cold War decade, but have reemerged (sometimes in different places) following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Washington’s proclamation of a war on terror.

In Perilous Partners, we examine the official justifications for the U.S. partnerships with corrupt, often brutal, autocrats and assess the credibility and sufficiency of those justifications. We look at both the benefits and costs in blood, treasure, and values to the American republic of more than a dozen specific associations. The various case studies span a wide range in terms of geography, U.S. security interests, and circumstances. Our goal has been to provide a good cross section of examples to illuminate the trends, motives, and consequences of U.S. policies.

As with any book on a large, complex topic, it is not possible to cover in a comprehensive manner all relevant cases. For example, we have chapters on Washington’s ties with dictatorships in the East Asian countries of South Korea and South Vietnam during the Cold War, but we do not discuss the equally questionable relationship with Indonesian dictator Suharto. Similarly, we include a chapter on U.S. links to the Somoza family in Nicaragua and the parade of Guatemalan military strongmen, but we devote only a brief discussion of policy toward the brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Finally, we endeavor to develop standards to determine when close relationships with friendly autocrats are necessary, when they are gratuitous betrayals of American values, and when they occupy a gray area. We hope that such a treatment will help both policymakers and the American people strike a proper balance in the future.

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Introduction: Confronting Ethical Dilemmas in U.S. Foreign Policy

Liberal democracies such as the United States face an acute dilemma in the conduct of foreign relations. Many states around the world are repressive or corrupt to varying degrees. Unfortunately, American national interests require cooperation with such regimes from time to time. To defeat Nazi Germany during World War II, the United States allied with the Soviet Union, despite having to partner with a regime at the height of its barbarity.

But such partnerships have the inherent danger of compromising, or even making a mockery of, America’s values of democratic governance, civil liberties, and free markets. Close working relationships with autocratic regimes, therefore, should not be undertaken lightly. U.S. officials have had a less than stellar record of grappling with that ethical dilemma. Especially during the Cold War, Washington was far too casual about sacrificing important values for less-than-compelling strategic rationales. The situation improved somewhat in the decade following the collapse of the Soviet empire, but even during that period, there were some questionable partnerships, including with some rather unsavory regimes in the Balkans and Central Asia. Since the 9/11 attacks, there has been further ethical regression, although U.S. policymakers have remained at least modestly more circumspect and selective than their Cold War–era counterparts.

The ethical rot in U.S. foreign policy began early in the Cold War and grew worse as the rivalry with the Soviet Union deepened. To counter the expansion of Soviet power and the threat of revolutionary communism, the United States acquired several repressive client states, largely for their supposed anti-communist bona fides. U.S. leaders cynically referred to some of the most corrupt and brutal dictatorships as members of the Free World, as long as those regimes cooperated with Washington’s geopolitical objectives. Even communist regimes that U.S. officials considered anti-Soviet, such as those in Yugoslavia and Romania, received America’s praise and public statements of support and friendship.

George F. Kennan, the principal author of the containment policy during the Cold War, once remarked, No people can be the judge of another’s domestic institutions and requirements. U.S. political leaders and much of the American public, though, tend to regard such realism as unappealing—or at least insufficient—as a basis for the republic’s international conduct. Historically, American leaders have seen (or at least portrayed) the nation’s mission internationally as something more than the narrow pursuit of national security. Such presidents as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt were especially inclined to cloak even mundane geopolitical objectives in the garb of soaring appeals to universal human values.

More recently, President George W. Bush was perhaps the boldest in attempting to eliminate the annoying conflict between interests and values. In his second inaugural address, the president stated: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in the entire world. America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one." (Emphasis added.)

It is impossible to separate neatly the realist, sometime cynical, roots of U.S. foreign policy from genuine beliefs in American exceptionalism and other idealistic influences. But the solution to that problem is not Bush’s naïve formulation that those elements are congruent. Both visions have characterized the country’s foreign policy at various times and in various ways. The tension between them raises many potential dilemmas. Leaders sometimes have to judge tradeoffs between advancing the national interest—especially the nation’s security—and advancing America’s values.

In doing so, they need to ask hard questions about whether an increase, especially a marginal increase, in U.S. security is worth an often substantial cost in terms of values. Officials also need to determine whether or when it might be appropriate to pressure security clients to reform, both to prevent the potential ouster of the sponsored regime and to reduce the conflict with American ideals. When important U.S. interests conflate with those of a dubious partner, a different, somewhat more lenient, set of standards should apply than when there is only a modest overlap of interests.

Finally, the American people need to determine to what extent U.S. aid to oppressive regimes ought to be subject to greater public and congressional scrutiny—and even outright skepticism.

To promote human rights in some countries and simultaneously support the world’s most savage and illegitimate autocracies may very well reflect Washington’s geopolitical preferences, but such inconsistency also highlights an enormous discrepancy between what the U.S. government claims to do and what it actually does. For U.S. foreign policy to be both effective and reasonably consistent with American values, certain conditions have to be met:

• The domestic basis of support for U.S. foreign policy must be maintained and strengthened. Because most Americans believe in the professed values of this country, a foreign policy that ignores or violates those values is likely to lose the public’s allegiance sooner or later. That is what happened with such missions as the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and more recently, the counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan. It is not merely that the ventures failed to achieve quick, decisive results, although that aspect clearly played a role, but that the United States was seen as expending blood and treasure on behalf of sleazy regimes. A disillusioned public turned against those missions, and that development created or intensified bitter domestic divisions. A similar dynamic occurred in response to calls for U.S. intervention to save the Shah of Iran in the late 1970s and block leftist insurgencies in Central America against right-wing governments in the 1980s. For a large number of Americans, it was not worth either the cost or risk to the United States to prop up such political partners. To sustain adequate public support for security partnerships, especially if the policy entails military ventures, the objective must be widely perceived as both worthy and attainable. Without those features, public support for a policy either proves insufficient from the outset or soon erodes, and either development is fatal in a democratic political system.

• To maintain public support and preserve American values, officials must make an honest assessment of the issues at stake. Too often, both during the Cold War and the post–Cold War eras, U.S. policymakers have hyped threats to genuine American interests. The alleged dangers posed by such adversaries as North Vietnam, Iraq, Serbia, the Taliban, and Syria border on being caricatures. At times, it appears that U.S. officials have deliberately engaged in distortions to gin-up public support for elective wars and other ventures that could likely be avoided. On other occasions, officials seem to succumb to their own propaganda. In either case, public support dissipates rapidly when evidence mounts that the supposed security threat to America is actually minimal. Although the American public might be willing to hold its collective nose and support a brutal, authoritarian ally—as they did regarding the alliance with Josef Stalin during World War II—to repel a true security menace to the republic, they are not willing to do so for far lesser stakes. It is both inappropriate and unrealistic to expect the public to embrace partnerships with the likes of the Shah of Iran, South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, or more recently, Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai, unless there is a compelling security justification. In all too many instances, that justification has been lacking, despite Washington’s argument to the contrary.

• To maintain public support and preserve American values, officials must be candid about the nature of Washington’s proposed clients. It is one thing to justify a partnership with an authoritarian ally on the basis of pragmatic considerations. President Franklin Roosevelt epitomized such realpolitik when he once famously observed of a de facto ally in Latin America: He’s an s.o.b., but he’s our s.o.b. It is quite another matter to whitewash the behavior of such partners and pretend that they are anything other than corrupt thugs. Yet U.S. administrations have amassed a disturbing track record of doing exactly that. It insulted the intelligence of the American people and publics around the world to portray the likes of the Shah of Iran, Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee, and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak as members of the Free World, but American officials did so. The initial efforts to laud Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf and Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki reflected the same approach during the war on terror. When the actual behavior of corrupt, brutal allies and clients makes a mockery of such portrayals, the American people understandably recoil from embracing them—even when on some occasions there may be a reasonable argument for preserving a particular partnership to protect valid U.S. interests.

• When partnerships with authoritarian allies are necessary, the association needs to be the minimum required to achieve crucial goals. The United States has fared best when it has pursued cautious, limited, and pragmatic relationships with autocratic allies. Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with China in the 1970s fit that description. That move altered the global balance of political and diplomatic power, forcing the Soviet Union to turn its attention away from applying pressure on the democratic West because it now had to deal with another adversary working in cooperation with Washington. However, most U.S. officials did not delude themselves or try to delude the American people about the nature of China’s regime. They recognized that it was an unpleasant, one-party state. Nor did Washington seek to make Beijing a close ally on issues other than countering Soviet power and influence. The two countries were allies of convenience, nothing more. That pragmatic Cold War relationship with Beijing ought to be the model for those other, relatively rare occasions when a security partnership with an authoritarian regime might be necessary.

• There needs to be a reassessment of America’s interests and global security position to minimize the supposed need for entanglements that undermine American values. As noted above, U.S. leaders have a track record of exaggerating threats to America’s security and interests to, among other objectives, justify partnerships with unsavory regimes. Part of the problem is the carryover of a mindset from World War II and the early Cold War period when powerful enemies did pose a significant security threat. But the situation today is substantially different—and it has been for several decades. With an enviable geographic position (weak and friendly neighbors to the north and south and vast oceans on both flanks), the largest economy in the world, a conventional military establishment far superior to any competitor, and a huge, sophisticated nuclear deterrent, the United States is probably the most secure great power in history. The lack of an existential, or even a serious, threat means that U.S. leaders have extraordinary latitude to adopt policies that minimize America’s involvement in quarrels in other parts of the world. That factor also means that only on rare occasions should Washington have to face the dilemma of forging close relationships with authoritarian partners. In most instances, an arm’s-length relationship with such regimes is all that is either necessary or appropriate. Adopting a more restrained foreign policy would greatly reduce the number of occasions when policymakers have to confront a conflict between America’s tangible interests and its fundamental values. Polling data also indicate that the American public would like to see the adoption of a more selective, restrained policy.

The first part of Perilous Partners surveys U.S. alliances with authoritarian governments during the Cold War (1945–1991). The second part of the book discusses the contemporary period, recapping the 1990s and going in depth for the period from 9/11 to the Arab Awakening. Those chapters inject historical insight into current dilemmas to create a better understanding of America’s past as well as provide possible policy prescriptions for the present and future. Both portions of Perilous Partners contain separate chapters for each questionable security relationship.

The concluding chapter, Closing the Values Gap: Protecting Security, Preserving Values, outlines the standards that should be used to determine when compromising American values is necessary, when it is questionable, and when it is gratuitous and counter productive. That chapter provides a strategy for resolving, or at least ameliorating, the ethical dilemmas between interests and values faced by U.S. policymakers. It proposes the concept of an arm’s length relationship with authoritarian regimes and movements, emphasizing that the United States will gain little if it deals with the threat of terrorism—as it too often dealt with the Soviet threat during the Cold War—in ways that routinely pollute American values. The degree of appropriate cooperation with an authoritarian regime should vary depending on how severe the security threat the United States faces in each situation, how valuable a given ally is in meeting that threat, how odious the ally’s domestic conduct is, and whether there are reasonable alternatives for achieving U.S. strategic objectives. That is the essence of a strategy based on ethical pragmatism, which is the best way to reconcile America’s strategic interests and its fundamental values.

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PART ONE

WASHINGTON’S QUESTIONABLE COLD WAR ALLIES

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1. Uncle Sam’s Backyard: Friendly Latin American Strongmen

U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere since the late 19th century probably deserves an entry in the Hall of Shame. During that period, Washington meddled with increasing frequency in the internal affairs of its southern neighbors. From the 1890s through the mid-1940s, many of the interventions seemed to take place on behalf of powerful business enterprises with important interests in those countries. On other occasions, especially following the onset of the Cold War, ideological and strategic motives appeared to dominate U.S. decisionmaking, although the economic dimension never disappeared. The inclination to meddle was most pronounced regarding the small nations of Central America (often contemptuously labeled as banana republics) and the equally small and weak island nations of the Caribbean.

Ever since the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States took a special interest in political, economic, and military developments in the Western Hemisphere—especially with respect to the part of the region closest to the U.S. homeland. Monroe’s statement (actually written by then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams) emphasized that the United States would not tolerate either the establishment of new European colonies in the Western Hemisphere or European efforts to undermine the independence of the newly sovereign states there.

But Washington’s ability or inclination to do much about its concerns was decidedly limited throughout most of the 19th century. U.S. naval capabilities were quite modest and those of U.S. ground forces even more so. Indeed, in an example of irony, America’s longstanding rival, Great Britain, ended up being the principal enforcer of the Monroe Doctrine. Washington and London became de facto allies—with the British clearly being the senior partner—in preventing continental European powers from trying to establish colonies or puppet states in the region. American and British interests, while they continued to differ sharply on other issues, overlapped regarding that objective.

The United States shamelessly acted as a security free rider on British exertions in the Western Hemisphere. One of the few occasions that Washington prepared to take strong, unilateral action against a European interloper was in Mexico during the late 1860s. France took advantage of the U.S. Civil War to set up an Austrian client, Archduke Maximilian, as the so-called Emperor of Mexico. Once the Civil War ended, however, the United States openly backed Mexican insurgents and made it clear to France that any attempt to preserve its foothold in Mexico would be met with decisive force. Maximilian fell from power and was captured and executed by Mexican republican forces in 1867, and France did nothing in response.

It was after the Spanish-American War in 1898 and ouster of Spain from Cuba and Puerto Rico, though, that U.S. interventionism became a firmly established policy in the Western Hemisphere. Washington did keep its pledge to grant Cuba independence, with some regret on the part of avid imperialists who believed that William McKinley’s administration had made an impetuous, ill-advised promise. Yet even though the United States did not formally annex Cuba as a colony, the new country’s independence was severely circumscribed. The Platt Amendment, which Congress passed in 1901, gave the United States great latitude to intervene in Cuba if U.S. officials concluded that stability or good governance in that country was in peril.¹ And Washington exercised that authority on a number of occasions during the succeeding decades.

Roots of Intervention: The Quest for Stability and Order

The key goal with respect to Cuba was order and stability, and that became the mantra with respect to U.S. policy toward other countries in the region as well. The concern was not entirely selfish or hypocritical. One of the recurring problems throughout Central America and the Caribbean was the tendency of corrupt and/or unstable governments to renege on debts owed to foreign creditors. When those creditors were U.S. banks, policymakers in Washington got an earful from angry, well-connected constituents who wanted the federal government to do something about those deadbeat regimes.

Matters were even more delicate when the defaults occurred on debts owed to prominent European governments or financial institutions. U.S. leaders feared that a European country might well use a debt default as a justification—or a pretext—to establish a strong political, and perhaps even a military, presence in the offending country and convert it into a de facto colony.² A move to do that would, of course, be a direct challenge to the Monroe Doctrine. Suspicions about Imperial Germany’s intentions were especially strong in Washington during the early years of the 20th century. When Germany (along with Britain and Italy) imposed a naval blockade on Venezuela in 1902 to compel the government in Caracas to pay its financial obligations, President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration took action. Although London and Rome were also participants in the multilateral campaign of coercion against Venezuela, the bulk of Washington’s ire was directed at Berlin because of Imperial Germany’s growing assertiveness—often brash behavior—in other regions.

The president issued an implicit warning to Berlin in his 1904 State of the Union Address that the United States would not tolerate coercive moves in America’s backyard. At the same time, to sooth the German government and other European governments that were upset about the financial conduct of Venezuela, as well as certain nations in Central America and the Caribbean, Roosevelt pledged that the United States would ensure that its small neighbors would maintain adequate order and fulfill their commitments to foreign creditors—even if Washington had to intervene with its own military forces to do so. That policy became the so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

The Corollary quickly became an all-purpose justification for a series of U.S. military interventions in the region. Washington ousted regimes that it considered corrupt, incompetent, or just insufficiently compliant with U.S. wishes. That standard led to multiple missions in such places as Haiti and Nicaragua. Indeed, the U.S. military acted as the de facto government of Haiti continuously from 1915 to 1934.

Uncle Sam’s heavy hand was equally evident in Nicaragua. Brookings Institution scholar Robert Kagan succinctly summarizes Washington’s conduct: The United States intervened with troops in 1912 and occupied Nicaragua for most of the next 21 years, assisted in a war against the [populist] rebel Augusto Cesar Sandino from 1927 to 1933, and was involved in the birth of the Somoza dynasty in 1936 and its perpetuation for another 43 years. Kagan adds that most informed Americans were not proud of that history.³

Although the official rationale for such missions was the need to preclude major European powers from taking action against offending regimes, some of the episodes clearly were in response to pressure from domestic corporations, especially United Fruit (which became United Brands in 1970), which had massive economic stakes in those often unstable nations.⁴ And it soon became clear that leaders in Washington did not especially care whether a Central American or Caribbean regime was democratic or not—despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary. Instead, U.S. officials were concerned about whether a regime could maintain internal order and whether it would cooperate with Washington’s goals and those of relevant American business entities. In other words, U.S. administrations had few qualms about backing tyrants—even brutal tyrants—as long as they were sufficiently compliant and effective.

That approach characterized U.S. policy in the hemisphere from the early years of the 20th century to the mid-1930s. Washington’s approach shifted somewhat in 1933 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed the Good Neighbor Policy, which included a commitment not to intervene in the internal affairs of hemispheric countries unless there was a threat to the vital interests of the United States. Under both Roosevelt and his successor in the White House, Harry Truman, the parade of military interventions did come to an end. But it was more a shift of tactics than a fundamental policy change. For example, during the mid- and late 1930s, Roosevelt quietly sought to undermine regimes that he thought might be potential allies of the aggressive European fascist powers.⁵ Such covert activities might be considered a precursor to the similar, but much more systematic, efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) regarding hostile regimes in the post–World War II period.

Moreover, Washington expressed little criticism of friendly authoritarian regimes, of which there were an abundance throughout the Roosevelt and Truman years. In fact, Washington seemed to nurture Latin American military leaders who would later rise to power and impose rigid dictatorships with the blessing, if not outright sponsorship of, the United States. The pattern began even before FDR’s administration, and British journalist Grace Livingstone describes that aspect of U.S. policy: In Central America and the Caribbean, which had borne the brunt of military intervention, the U.S. protected its interests by grooming friendly dictators. Before the U.S. Marines withdrew from Nicaragua in 1933, the U.S. had created, trained and equipped a strong National Guard and appointed one Gen. Anastasio Somoza as commander. Somoza seized power from the civilian government in 1936. The same tactic was used in the Dominican Republic, where Rafael Trujillo was appointed head of the U.S.-trained National Guard. Trujillo led a coup in 1930 and established a tyranny that lasted until 1961. Livingstone notes that by the mid-1930s, dictatorships had been established across Central America.⁶

And U.S. officials seemed exceedingly tolerant of their authoritarian protégés. Livingstone describes the indulgent U.S. policy toward such leaders:

State Department officials built up a relationship with the corrupt and sadistic sergeant Fulgencio Batista, helping him to dominate the Cuban political scene. . . . Batista was invited to Washington to meet Roosevelt in 1938; Roosevelt personally met Somoza at the train station when he visited Washington in 1939, and Trujillo was invited for tea with the president and his wife at the White House in 1940. President Roosevelt had become, as Peruvian politician Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre said, the good neighbor of tyrants.⁷

The Cold War: Interventions Become More Ideological

During the Cold War, Washington’s tendency to intervene, either covertly or with military invasions, resurged. But intervention in the internal political affairs of Caribbean and Central American countries took on a more ideological aspect. As U.S. fears that Soviet influence might spread into the Western Hemisphere intensified, American policymakers were determined to prevent the emergence of left-wing regimes and to support virtually any ruler who professed to be anti-communist, regardless of that individual’s record of corruption or human rights abuses. Preventing the spread of communist regimes in Washington’s neighborhood also was the mantra for sending U.S. troops into the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983.

The U.S.-led intervention in the Dominican Republic thwarted a rebellion, led by some junior military officers, which sought to restore to office leftist president Juan Bosch, who had won election in 1962 but was deposed in a September 1963 military coup. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his advisers regarded the pro-Bosch insurgents as little more than pawns of Fidel Castro—and, therefore, of Moscow. According to Johnson, Bosch’s noncommunist supporters had almost no control over the rebel movement. For the most part, power rested with the Communists and their armed followers.⁸ The United States launched a military intervention, Operation Power Pack, with 42,000 troops to prevent Bosch’s return to the presidency. The intervention succeeded, and after complicated maneuvering, Washington placated resentful Dominicans with a promise of free elections the following year. U.S. financial and organizational assistance, both overt and covert, helped pave the way for a more pro-U.S. political figure, Joaquin Balaguer, to defeat Bosch in that election and take office.⁹

Balaguer had served as a loyal aide to Trujillo during the 1940s and 1950s, and his own rule during his first stint as president had more than a few authoritarian features, including the jailing of political opponents. Later in his political career, including several more nonconsecutive terms as president, his policies exhibited greater respect for human rights, and he even acquired a reputation as a genuine democratic reformer.¹⁰

Ronald Reagan’s explanation for the Grenada intervention nearly two decades later was virtually a duplicate of Johnson’s justification for the Dominican intervention. Officially, the United States was merely responding to a request from the obscure Organization of Eastern Caribbean States to reverse a coup by hard-line Marxists against a somewhat more moderate Marxist government under Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. According to Reagan, Grenada’s island neighbors "told us that under Bishop they had been worried by what appeared to be a large Cuban-sponsored military buildup on Grenada vastly disproportionate to its needs; now, they said, these even more radical Marxists in control of Grenada had launched a murderous reign of terror against their enemies. Unless they were stopped, the Caribbean neighbors said, it was just a matter of time before the Grenadians and Castro moved on their countries."¹¹

Reagan certainly felt the same way, concluding that there was only one answer that he could give to the countries that had asked for Washington’s help. U.S. Marines soon went ashore, ousted the new regime, and restored order. Afterwards, Reagan stated that he probably never felt better during his entire presidency. I think our decision to stand up to Castro and the brownshirts on Grenada not only stopped the Communists in their tracks in that part of the world but perhaps helped all Americans stand a little taller.¹²

Countering perceived Soviet influence in the hemisphere was not confined to the Caribbean and Central America, although it was strongest in that region. Washington also forged ties with an assortment of right-wing (often military) regimes in South America—even in those portions of the continent that were geographically more distant than Europe from the U.S. homeland. As noted in chapter 2, the Reagan administration thought it improper to criticize the ruling junta in Argentina, which murdered (or disappeared’) several thousand political opponents and kidnapped their young children for distribution to regime supporters. American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Falcoff concluded that the Argentine military liquidated the terrorists and their accomplices. But it also abducted and murdered many who were guilty only of membership in left-wing political movements or intellectual circles, or only of being acquainted with someone who was."¹³

Callousness about the junta’s behavior was not confined to the Reagan administration. Following the Argentine military’s seizure of power in March 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger seemed to go out of his way to assure junta leaders that Washington was not concerned about allegations of human rights violations. In a June meeting with the new foreign minister, Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti, Kissinger told Guzzetti: We wish the new government well and would do what we can to help it succeed. Kissinger stated that U.S. leaders understood that the Argentine regime was in a difficult period. It’s a curious time, when political, criminal, and terrorist activities tend to merge without any clear separation. He then gave a diplomatic green light to the junta’s developing crackdown on dissidents. We understand you must establish your authority.¹⁴

At a meeting with Guzzetti in October, Kissinger seemed even more solicitous, despite the mounting evidence of the pervasive abuses that would characterize Argentina’s dirty war. He assured Guzzetti: I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems but not the context. Stating again that Washington wanted the junta to succeed, he emphasized: We want a stable situation. We won’t cause you unnecessary difficulties.¹⁵ As in earlier decades, political stability in the hemisphere was a very high U.S. priority, while human rights and democracy occupied a much lower status.

According to Robert Hill, Washington’s ambassador in Buenos Aires, Guzzetti was euphoric following the October meeting. Even though Hill had originally viewed the coup with some sympathy, believing that it would end the worsening political instability in Argentina, he had become disturbed about the extent of the junta’s brutality. Now, he was even more troubled that Guzzetti had come away from his encounter with Kissinger believing that the U.S. government cared little or nothing about human rights abuses. Guzzetti went to the U.S. expecting to hear some strong, firm, direct warnings on his government’s human rights practices; rather than that, he has returned in a state of jubilation, convinced that there is no real problem with the USG [U.S. government] over that issue.¹⁶

Washington was similarly mute about atrocities that friendly authoritarian regimes committed in such places as Uruguay, Brazil, and Paraguay. In all of those cases, any strategic justification based on geographic proximity was weak, at best.

And then there was Washington’s murky involvement in the overthrow and assassination of Chile’s leftist president, Salvador Allende, in the early 1970s. At a minimum, Nixon administration officials knew that the Chilean military was engaged in repeated plots against the government and quietly encouraged such maneuvers. At worst, the administration actively plotted with like-minded Chilean generals to remove an unfriendly, populist thorn in Washington’s side.¹⁷ Conservative scholar Mark Falcoff contends that the role of the United States in the events leading to the fall of Allende has been greatly exaggerated, but he concedes that the Nixon administration and the conservative political community greeted the coup with some relief. Moreover, among many conservatives, the Pinochet government had definite appeal.¹⁸

Despite the pervasive propaganda on the left over the decades, Allende was something less than a political saint. Although he had been duly elected, his behavior in office foreshadowed the ugly measures that Venezuelan ruler Hugo Chávez used to stifle independent media outlets, harass opponents, and undermine democracy in that country during the early years of the 21st century. The deepening and accelerating trend of Allende’s authoritarian tendencies was worrisome, both to genuine Chilean democrats and U.S. officials. Chilean democracy, much less the health of property rights and civil liberties in that country, was not in great shape during Allende’s years in office. Falcoff has a point when he argues that the subsequent coup and military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet was the outcome of actions that brought Chile perilously close to civil war in 1973.¹⁹

Nevertheless, the reality is that Washington once again meddled in the internal affairs of another hemispheric nation, even when the justification on security grounds was not especially strong. And whatever Allende’s faults, they paled in comparison to the murderous military dictatorship led by Pinochet that replaced him and brutalized Chile for the next 16 years. As in the case of Argentina in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Pinochet’s regime imprisoned or executed thousands of ideological opponents.

Washington’s relationship with Pinochet, though, remained somewhat aloof, particularly compared to relations with other friendly tyrants in the hemisphere. That was especially true during President Jimmy Carter’s administration, but it was generally the case during the Gerald R. Ford and Reagan administrations as well. Pinochet was an extremely prominent symbol of odious, right-wing oppression for human rights activists and other liberal, even moderate, groups in the United States and around the world. It became politically and diplomatically toxic for any American president, whatever his personal preferences might have been, to embrace a leader who had achieved that dubious status. Unfortunately, Washington was less squeamish about embracing comparable—or even worse—human rights abusers closer to home.

Guatemala: From Imperfect Democracy to Slaughterhouse

The scope of Washington’s determination to thwart the spread of communism in the hemisphere, especially in Central America and the Caribbean, became evident in 1954 when the CIA orchestrated a coup (Operation Success) to oust the left-leaning, democratically elected (by some 65 percent of the vote) president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. It was apparent that Washington had Árbenz in its crosshairs from the moment Dwight D. Eisenhower took the oath of office in January 1953. In his memoirs, Eisenhower asserted flatly that among the dangers the United States faced when he assumed the presidency was that Communism was striving to establish its first beachhead in the Americas by gaining control of Guatemala.²⁰ He added that once Árbenz came to power, his actions soon created the strong suspicion that he was merely a puppet manipulated by Communists.²¹

The first example that Eisenhower cited as evidence, though, pointed to a rather different grievance:

[O]n February 24, 1953, the government announced its intention, under an agrarian reform law, to seize about 225,000 acres of unused United Fruit Company land. The company lost its appeal to the Guatemalan Supreme Court to prevent this discriminatory and unfair seizure. (Of all lands expropriated, two thirds belonged to United Fruit.) In return the company was to receive the woefully inadequate compensation of $600,000 in long-term non-negotiable agrarian bonds.²²

Although Eisenhower conceded that expropriation by itself did not prove Communism, noting that Mexico had expropriated foreign oil companies decades earlier without turning into a communist dictatorship, the president regarded Guatemala’s action as a large black mark against Árbenz. His solicitude for United Fruit also was reminiscent of the attitude of many previous U.S. administrations toward Central American governments—and often served as a prelude to a U.S. intervention. The other examples that Eisenhower cited as evidence of Árbenz’s alleged communist leanings ranged from ambiguous to trivial.

A key figure in the demonizing of Árbenz was the new U.S. ambassador to Guatemala, John E. Peurifoy. In a report to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Eisenhower, Peurifoy described a six-hour meeting he held with the Guatemalan leader less than a month after taking his diplomatic post: He listened while I counted off the leading Communists in his regime, but he gave no ground; many notorious Reds he denied to be Communists; if they were, they were not dangerous; if dangerous, he could control them; if not controllable, he would round them up. It was clear that Peurifoy had no tolerance for Árbenz. It seemed to me that the man thought like a Communist and talked like a Communist, and if not actually one, would do until one came along.²³ The ambassador warned Dulles and Eisenhower that unless communist influences were counteracted, Guatemala would fall under complete communist control within six months.

In congressional testimony (before the Subcommittee on Latin America of the House Select Committee on Communist Aggression) on October 8, 1954, following the U.S. orchestrated coup, Peurifoy was even more categorical than he had been in his report to the secretary of state:

The Arbenz government, beyond any question, was controlled and dominated by Communists. Those Communists were directed from Moscow. The Guatemalan government and the Communist leaders of that country did continuously and actively intervene in the internal affairs of neighboring countries in an effort to create disorder and overthrow established governments. And the Communist conspiracy in Guatemala did represent a very real and very serious menace to the security of the United States.²⁴

That assessment was a classic case of hyperbole and alarmism. And the last conclusion bordered on preposterous. Even if Guatemala had come under the control of a communist regime, that development by itself would hardly have posed a very serious menace to the security of a superpower. Even a lower-grade menace could have emerged only if Guatemala became a Soviet puppet (as Cuba would do at the end of the decade) and if it then allowed the USSR to establish military bases on its territory. But Washington had ample means at its disposal to prevent that outcome.

Even the conclusion that the Árbenz government was communist-dominated is questionable in retrospect. Árbenz certainly was a man of the political left, and his wife appears to have been a communist fellow traveler, at the very least. Much of his support came from socialist or communist trade unions, peasant unions, and other far-left organizations.²⁵ Yet Guatemala continued to vote with the United States and its allies a majority of the time in the United Nations on major issues where Washington and Moscow were at odds.²⁶ The government’s domestic behavior deviated from the communist stereotype as well. For example, Árbenz did not try to create collective farms with the land seized from United Fruit and other large landholders. Instead, the government distributed that land to 100,000 families. The cases for and against land reform in Latin America are complex, since some of that land was originally acquired in less than ethical fashion, while owners of other tracts appeared to have acted in a legitimate manner. Sorting out the merits on the basis of law or morality in that part of the world is not an easy task.²⁷

Within the Latin American context, what Árbenz did was not all that radical. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Kwitny noted: The land reform of Jacobo Árbenz fell perfectly within the guidelines that would be recommended by the U.S. State Department a mere seven years later as part of President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress program. Indeed, Árbenz’s effort "was positively tame compared to the land reform program in El Salvador in the 1980s, which the United States not only conceived but enforced."²⁸

It is also pertinent to remember that Peurifoy’s allegation came at a time when the United States was in the midst of, indeed approaching the culmination of, McCarthyism. To say that the junior senator from Wisconsin and his legion of imitators were rather loose with their accusations of communist leanings would be an understatement.

Whether administration officials genuinely believed that Árbenz was a communist pawn, or whether that was a convenient pretext to conceal the motive of once again having Washington oust a regime that was hostile to United Fruit and other U.S. businesses may never be known. The disturbingly close associations of several policymakers with United Fruit at least warrant some skepticism about the sincerity of their allegations about the Árbenz government’s communist leanings.²⁹ The likelihood is that both factors played a role. What is clear is that the Eisenhower administration moved quickly to remove a neighboring government that it neither liked nor trusted.

The final straw for Washington came when the Guatemalan regime tried to import a shipment of weapons from Czechoslovakia, a move that U.S. officials viewed as an attempt to spread both left-wing revolutions and Soviet power throughout Central America.³⁰ The weapons purchase was worrisome, but it came only after Árbenz had failed in his efforts to secure weapons from the United States or other Western powers (the latter failure largely because of Washington’s pressure on its allies to isolate Guatemala).

Furthermore, even before the attempted arms purchase from the Soviet bloc, CIA officers had approached various Guatemalan political leaders, looking for someone who would be the focal point for a rebellion against Árbenz. In several of those meetings, they were accompanied by executives of United Fruit.³¹ The CIA and its Guatemalan allies eventually settled on General Carlos Castillo Armas, living in exile in neighboring Honduras. Castillo Armas was not especially well known in Guatemala and appeared to have almost no political following. Nevertheless, the United States promptly helped him by funding and training an army of exiles. That force crossed the border back into Guatemala in the late spring of 1954, but the advance was sluggish at best. Rebel fortunes changed when a small fleet of old bombers, flown by U.S. pilots, bombed and strafed targets inside Guatemala, especially near the capital.³² Those attacks had more psychological than military effect, but they served as a catalyst for an uprising by right-wing elements of the Guatemalan army against the country’s leftist president. Under increasing pressure, Árbenz resigned and fled to Mexico. The CIA’s fingerprints were all over this domestic rebellion just as they had been a year earlier in Iran.³³ (See chapter 6.)

John Prados, an expert on intelligence operations, aptly notes the cynical, ultimately myopic, aspect of U.S. policies toward the balky but democratic governments in Iran and Guatemala:

In the cold war vision of a two-camp world, there was apparently no place for indigenous nationalism. Not only did the United States readily act against countries like Iran and Guatemala, but the actions were initiated regardless of the nations’ efforts to maintain friendly relations with the United States. The operations made a mockery of the oft-reiterated American principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other states. The CIA was unleashed in the name of democracy, but democracy as defined by American foreign policy came to mean governments that followed pro-American policies.³⁴

Eisenhower’s account of the Guatemalan coup was at least as disingenuous as his whitewashed description of the Iranian coup. His version was that Árbenz had not only declared a state of siege, but launched a reign of terror. Then, armed forces under Carlos Castillo Armas, an exiled former colonel in the Guatemalan Army, crossed the border from Honduras into Guatemala, initially with a mere handful of men—reportedly about two hundred. As he progressed, he picked up recruits.³⁵

The U.S. role, according to Eisenhower, was limited to replacing two old bombers in Castillo’s air force, which had crashed during the early stages of the rebellion. The rest of what happened was purely an indigenous uprising of the Guatemalan military and population. The major factor in the successful outcome was the disaffection of the Guatemalan armed forces and the population as a whole with the tyrannical regime of Arbenz. And the president had nothing but praise for Castillo Armas, who after some brief jockeying for power was confirmed first as the head of the military junta, and then, by a thundering majority, as President. According to Eisenhower, Castillo Armas proved to be far more than a mere rebel; he was a farseeing and able statesman. He also enjoyed the devotion of his people.³⁶

CIA chief Allen Dulles, brother of Eisenhower’s secretary of state, was only a shade more candid than his boss about the U.S. role in the Guatemalan revolution. He acknowledged that once it became clear that Árbenz was out to create a communist state, the United States provided aid to a group of Guatemalan patriots, and thereby the danger was successfully met.³⁷

All was apparently well now that the communist tyrant Jacobo Árbenz was out of the way. In a nationwide television address on June 30, 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles congratulated the people of Guatemala for overturning a regime that had been openly manipulated by international communism. John Peurifoy gave a more honest assessment of who was responsible for the ouster of Árbenz, when he quipped, tongue in cheek, that his superiors were complaining that he had been forty-five minutes off schedule.³⁸ Árbenz was gone, and Washington rejoiced. Now the future of Guatemala, Dulles proclaimed in his television address, lies at the disposal of the Guatemalan people.³⁹

Not quite. That prediction proved to be no more accurate than the official account of the overthrow of the Árbenz government. Washington’s action may have blocked the danger of Soviet influence in Guatemala (if that danger truly existed), but it indisputably subjected the people of that country to brutal military rule for decades, a period in which some 200,000 people perished at the hands of right-wing regimes.

The Castillo Armas government was relatively benign compared to its successors, but it was bad enough, and the legal foundation for the systematic repression that followed was built during his presidency. One of his first actions was to create a new Committee for National Defense against Communism (CDNCC), and in just the first few weeks that bureaucracy imprisoned more than 4,000 suspects. In August 1954, the regime issued Decree 59, which authorized the CDNCC to, among other things, jail anyone on its list of suspects for up to six months without trial. The temporary detention power was not a trivial matter, since the suspect list eventually comprised fully 10 percent of Guatemala’s population.⁴⁰

The most odious aspect of the provision, though, was that there was no limit to the number of times the CDNCC could arrest and detain a suspect for a six-month period. A member of Castillo Armas’s government candidly told a U.S. Embassy official that with this law, we can now pick up practically anybody we want and hold them for as long as we want.⁴¹ Legally, regime critics (or even unlucky nonpolitical types) could now be imprisoned sequentially for years—and that is precisely what happened.

Such conduct did nothing to discourage the Eisenhower administration from backing Castillo Armas and his successors. Indeed, U.S. officials seemed pleased with the crackdown on leftist elements. Washington gave especially high priority to funding, equipping, and training the Guatemalan military, arguing that it was a crucial bulwark against a revived communist threat. In 1963, that better trained, professional force overthrew a civilian government and ushered in a series of military regimes that engaged in abuses of human rights that made the practices of Castillo Armas’s presidency look mild by comparison.

Yet, with the partial exception of the Carter years, U.S. administrations never faltered in their support of the Guatemalan military dictatorships, providing millions of dollars in aid and hardware. Even as military units conducted bloody and largely indiscriminate raids against accused insurgents, U.S. officers worked directly with those units. How bad was the collateral damage? In one especially bloody period in 1971, government forces killed nearly 1,000 people, most of whom seemed to be civilians, in a mere 12 weeks. Army troops raided the National University, where they assassinated three professors and arrested hundreds of students, some of whom subsequently disappeared. Colonel Carlos Manuel Arana Osorio, selected by the military junta to be the winning candidate in the 1970 presidential election, vowed to eliminate all insurgents even if it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery. Arana and his successors worked very hard to achieve that objective in the coming years, utilizing both the military and allied right-wing death squads.

Most of the victims were leftists, and some undoubtedly were hard-core communists, but that label was routinely attached to all people that the government arrested or killed. Moreover, some of the targets were not even arguably communists. In the lead-up to elections in 1974, death squads (which included off-duty soldiers) assassinated a dozen officials of the centrist Christian Democratic Party. Cornell University Professor Walter LaFeber correctly concludes that the Guatemalan army was not content merely to kill those on the Left; it wanted to eliminate everyone between itself and the Left as well.⁴²

The army’s brutalities reached the point that even its civilian front men sometimes balked. In 1980, the military-backed civilian vice president resigned in protest. There are no political prisoners in Guatemala, he remarked. There are only political assassinations.⁴³ Matters did not improve the following decade. An especially ugly episode occurred in December 1982 in the village of Dos Erres. Twenty Guatemalan Kabiles (special forces soldiers) arrived at the village in search of insurgents. They proceeded to run amok. The soldiers ultimately killed some 250 men, women, and children. Gilberto Jordan, one of the perpetrators, later confessed that the first person he killed at Dos Erres was a baby, whom Jordan threw down the shaft of the village well. Investigators eventually found 162 skeletal remains in that well. Evidence also emerged that the soldiers raped and tortured most of the girls and women before killing them.⁴⁴

The Dos Erres massacre may have been marginally more gruesome than the norm, but there were literally dozens of such episodes during the military’s decades-long counterinsurgency war. At least 200,000 people perished during that period, mostly among the largely Indian populations in the rural areas of the country. According to Tim Weiner’s National Book Award–winning book on the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, between 90 and 96 percent of those deaths were at the hands of the Guatemalan military. Moreover, he contends that as late as 1994 the CIA’s officers in Guatemala still went to great lengths to conceal the nature of their close relations to the military and to suppress reports that Guatemalan officers on its payroll were murderers, torturers, and thieves.⁴⁵

As the violence surged during the 1970s and early 1980s, a number of fissures in Guatemalan society developed or intensified. A leftist rebel insurgency gained strength, especially in predominantly Indian rural communities, which had been largely excluded from Guatemala’s Mestiso (mixed blood)-dominated political and economic system. The government responded with an ever bloodier crackdown.

But divisions arose within the political and economic elites—and ultimately within the military itself. Mafia-style warfare erupted in the major cities between rival business and political factions. By the early 1980s, the breakdown of unity had reached the top echelons of the military, as generals became little more than warlords presiding over competing gangs determined to maximize their plunder and power. Washington viewed the growing chaos with dismay but seemed largely incapable of crafting a coherent response. LaFeber succinctly summarizes the dilemma that U.S. leaders faced:

Washington officials were not pleased with their own creation in Guatemala, but—much as one hesitates to stop feeding a pet boa constrictor—they were reluctant to cut off aid and face the consequences. Throughout those bloody, bleak years, they tried to resolve the irresolvable: extend U.S. military and economic aid so the army could fight the growing revolution, but threaten to cut off aid if the ‘rival mafias’ did not stop murdering Indians, labor leaders, educators, lawyers, and each other.⁴⁶

The violence did not truly abate until a peace accord was signed between the war-weary government and various opposition factions in 1996, and the country began a transition to a genuine democracy. When one weighs the consequences of Washington’s decision to overthrow Árbenz and later support a series of right-wing dictatorships in Guatemala, the human costs were horrifyingly high.

Washington and the Somoza Family: Nicaragua as an Authoritarian Client

In addition to the parade of Guatemalan military strongmen, U.S. administrations backed other dubious allies in the hemisphere. An especially close association existed with the Somoza family of Nicaragua, which ruled the country with an iron fist from the late 1930s to the late 1970s. Washington bore considerable responsibility for the rise of the first dictator of that dynasty, Anastasio Somoza García, since his original power base was as commander of the Nicaraguan National Guard—the military force that the U.S. occupation authorities organized and trained.

Right-wing analysts, though, make a valiant attempt to whitewash Washington’s record of being the godfather of hemispheric tyrants. Robert Kagan, for example, asserts that neither in the Dominican Republic nor in Cuba nor in Nicaragua could the United States be held responsible for dictatorship. In Nicaragua dictatorship had been the normal state of affairs since its independence; tyranny and one-party rule had been interrupted only by periods of revolution and near-anarchy. He concedes that the United States had helped create a new army, the National Guard, which had been used to put its leader into the presidency, but Kagan seems to consider that action little more than a minor faux pas. Somoza García had the skills and wiles to keep himself in power for 20 years. He may, therefore, be considered one of Nicaragua’s most successful dictators, but he cannot be considered the creation of the United States.⁴⁷

That interpretation is, at a minimum, a sanitized version of Washington’s conduct. The United States may not have been the outright creator of Latin American autocrats, but U.S. policy certainly facilitated the rise of such dictators as Batista in Cuba, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti, and Somoza in Nicaragua. Time and again U.S. officials established and strengthened indigenous military forces, ostensibly to maintain order once U.S. troops would depart, giving would-be dictators an unmatchable power base. American leaders either knew or should have known that building up such institutions would inherently undermine any prospects for democratic rule. But Washington was, at best, indifferent and at worst, supportive of the rise of tyrants—as long as they were friendly to U.S. economic and strategic interests. That is why a succession of U.S. administrations got along splendidly with the Somoza dictatorship for more than four decades.

Yet according to Kagan and other conservative writers, it was the lack of sustained U.S. intervention that was the problem. If only the United States had acted in the Western Hemisphere as Britain did around the world at the height of the imperial era, they argue, we could have prevented the rise and perpetuation of autocratic regimes, enabling our neighbors to enjoy good governance and at least quasi-democratic systems under the supervision of Washington’s benevolent hegemony. Instead, according to that school of thought, the United States went through cycles of intervention and withdrawal, and once the Good Neighbor Policy was put in place, nonintervention allegedly became the norm.

The best that can be said for that view is that it represents tenacious wishful thinking. The repeated undermining of regimes (even democratic ones) considered insufficiently cooperative, as well as the sustained support for the Guatemalan dictatorships, the Somoza family, and other compliant, autocratic regimes, suggests that Washington’s intervention was hardly sporadic. And the alleged policy of nonintervention that the Good Neighbor Policy symbolized was little more than a diplomatic façade. Military intervention may not have been as frequent or as blatant a feature of U.S. policy as it had been during the first three decades of the 20th century, but that tactic never disappeared. And the more subtle tactics of subversion and covert military action were pervasive. Latin America did not suffer from a lack of U.S. geopolitical attention or action. In particular, Washington’s partnership with (often brutal) authoritarian rulers remained a key feature of U.S. policy in the hemisphere.

There were always prominent Americans willing to act as apologists for the Somozas and other autocratic U.S. clients. One of the worst was Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Reagan. Kirkpatrick described Anastasio Somoza Debayle (son and eventual successor of Somoza Garcia) as merely a moderate autocrat. Lauding Somoza Debayle and the Shah of Iran, she offered the