The American Century and its Discontents

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 112
Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

America has a message for the world: we’ve come into prominence for a reason. We come to bring justice, freedom, and democracy throughout the earth. The problem is, if we’re honest, we know we haven’t always lived up to our own rhetoric; but we’re not always honest, and therein lies the problem. When challenged on the gap between our language and our actions, we frequently respond with violence.

Journalist and foreign policy scholar Stephen Kinzer spent much of the 1980s reporting from Central America, from countries touched by America’s foreign policy backwash. He became conscious of the cognitive dissonance that arises in United States administrations when our small-D democratic values run aground on real-world political exigencies.He chronicles here the times America has, directly or by proxy, overthrown fourteen lawful governments. The butcher’s bill isn’t pretty.

The United States overthrew its first government in Hawai’i, in 1893. White planters, mostly American, owned extensive tracts of Hawai’ian land, growing sugar for export. They perceived Queen Lili’uokalani as an impediment to their economic expansion. With the private backing of William Henry Harrison’s administration, the White planters overthrew an internationally recognized government and declared themselves an American protectorate. To the Queen’s shock, the world seemed okay with that.

Thus begins a pattern which Kinzer identifies clearly throughout America’s “regime change” foreign policy: we verbally express commitment to global democracy and international autonomy, but flinch when autonomous nations, many of them democratically elected, go against American wishes. The gulf between American values and United States government actions is frequently huge. And sadly, it hasn’t gotten much better since 1893.

Sometimes, the United States has overthrown international regimes directly. This has happened openly, as when George W. Bush authorized regime changes in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s also happened covertly, as when President Kennedy approved the removal of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. In both cases, these governments have opposed American policy, but enforcing that policy ultimately undermined American interests. We’re still paying the price for all these interventions.

Stephen Kinzer

Other times, America has overthrown governments by proxy. Besides the White plantation owners in Hawaii, America permitted United Fruit to overthrow home governments in Nicaragua and Guatemala. This not only led directly to decades of civil war in both nations, it required the United States to intervene to prevent popular Marxist uprisings. Cold War rhetoric required America to interfere with other countries’ autonomy to prevent Communism from gaining ground.

Kinzer has differing relationships with different overthrows. He’s largely forgiving, for instance, of America’s invasion of Grenada. In truth, Grenada’s socialist government had descended into infighting, and was probably about to collapse, leaving a power vacuum in the Caribbean. But Kinzer depicts that government as illegitimate anyway, led by a lite-beer Leninist university dorm room bull session. This interpretation is, let’s politely say, still debated in foreign policy circles.

He’s also more forgiving of America’s overthrow of Hawai’i than most Hawai’ians would be. He depicts American control as largely popular. But he bases that opinion on people living in Hawai’i; because of militarism and resource hoarding, most Native Hawai’ians can’t afford to live in their homeland. Even in America, the overthrow was divisive: President Harrison privately approved the coup, but before it was complete, Grover Cleveland was President, and was horrified.

Conservative readers will probably interpret Kinzer’s critical attitude toward United States interventionism and regime change as anti-American. Not so. Kinzer criticizes America, not to disparage it, but to hold its people, collectively, to their highest ideals. He wants America to follow its own teachings of freedom, democracy, and justice, teachings we’ve long espoused but frequently not followed. Kinzer wants America to be as good as its rhetoric.

Therein lies the message. America has historically believed in Enlightenment-era principles of popular sovereignty and rule by the population. But we’ve also believed the Enlightenment’s myth of universal truth. We believe our interpretation of democracy and justice applies everywhere, and when different cultures read their social, religious, or economic needs differently than ours, America believes these countries have strayed from universal truth. We believe they need correction and “rescue.”

Like me, Kinzer believes America has great potential to do good in our conflicted world. It can correct human rights injustices, bring democracy, and stabilize an unstable globe. But the ways it’s attempted to do so have often created terrible blowback, and resulted in greater instability. Kinzer doesn’t want to blame America; he wants America to live by its own principles. It can start by stopping overthrowing world governments.