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Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow provides a fast-paced narrative history of the coups, revolutions, and invasions by which the United States has toppled fourteen foreign governments -- not always to its own benefit"Regime change" did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush, but has been an integral part of U.S. foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and continuing through the Spanish-American War and the Cold War and into our own time, the United States has not hesitated to overthrow governments that stood in the way of its political and economic goals. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 is the latest, though perhaps not the last, example of the dangers inherent in these operations.In Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer tells the stories of the audacious politicians, spies, military commanders, and business executives who took it upon themselves to depose monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers. He also shows that the U.S. government has often pursued these operations without understanding the countries involved; as a result, many of them have had disastrous long-term consequences.In a compelling and provocative history that takes readers to fourteen countries, including Cuba, Iran, South Vietnam, Chile, and Iraq, Kinzer surveys modern American history from a new and often surprising perspective."Detailed, passionate and convincing . . . [with] the pace and grip of a good thriller." -- Anatol Lieven, The New York Times Book Review
416 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 4, 2006
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About the author
Stephen Kinzer
28books729followersStephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than 50 countries on five continents. His articles and books have led the Washington Post to place him "among the best in popular foreign policy storytelling." ()
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July 2, 2023
5-star topic (especially presenting it to the US mainstream in an accessible manner), minus 2 stars for Kinzer's career of shilling for the NYT when courageous journalism is inconvenient...
The Good:
--We have to start somewhere, and Kinzer's account of a century of US terrorism on other countries does provide the bare-bone names, dates and places.
--Themes of US capitalist interests (against foreign independence), missionary racism, and empire geopolitics are acknowledged to a certain degree.
--The reporter-style writing and boilerplate assumptions likely improve readability for beginners (what I call "default liberals").
The Bad:
--As other reviewers noted, Kinzer is a reporter for the New York Times (NYT, which has a pathetic record, particularly in foreign policy, as the empire's stenographers and cheerleaders) and provides rather limited understanding of critical geopolitics/political economy (leaving space for status quo assumptions to go unchallenged).
--The chapters where he tries to categorize types of interventions and discusses the "Why's" and "Could Have/Should Have's" are varied in shallowness and absurdity.
--Ex. after going through a century of "interventions" that could just as easily be called terrorism, Kinzer still assumes that US ground troops and perhaps even temporary US military government in Afghanistan is the fallback option. Zero mention of multi-polarity and regionalism (and US imperialism preventing this), i.e. regional diplomatic efforts with actual understanding and responsibility for the area to deal directly with building communities while preventing violence. As if the rest of the world (esp. the coloured Global South) is inherently uncivilized, in desperate need of US democracy-bombs.
The Ugly:
--Kinzer's career of shilling at the NYT for the US military-industrial-complex on current (thus urgent, but clouded by the most "fog of war" propaganda) imperialist interventions has made its mark; Kinzer shows up in Chomsky/Herman's classic Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. In other words, Kinzer is literally an example of imperialist propaganda in the most famous Western book critiquing US propaganda. Round of applause!
--Principled foreign policy journalists do not survive at the NYT, for example: Chris Hedges and .
--With any introductory material where you sacrifice quality for the hope of appealing to a wider audience, the risk is re-enforcing certain status quo assumptions that perpetuate our inability to see the whole picture and imagine systemic change. The bridge from accessible to nuanced critiques is meant to be crossed, not to get stuck on:
1) History of US imperialism:
--A more critical (yet still accessible) intro, by the fabulous : Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
--Vijay on imperialism's ideological censorship: and Chomksy on how this affects the liberal intellegensia (i.e. educated "devoted liberals", rather than the public of "default liberals"): Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
-playlist (featuring , , , , etc.):
-deeper works:
-The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
-The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
-
-The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump
2) Geopolitical Economy of US imperialism:
--Not specific to US: Lenin's famous 1916 intro (Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism) is interesting historically, especially in parallel with 's 1915 essay (how imperialist Scramble for Africa led to WWI).
--To connect to today's imperialism:
i) Accessible historical overview: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
ii) Accessible intro to critical economy theory: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
iii) Magnum opus connecting theory to history: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
iv) Dive into US's monetary imperialism ("dollar hegemony"): Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance (interview: )
v) Debates:
-A Theory of Imperialism
-The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time
The Good:
--We have to start somewhere, and Kinzer's account of a century of US terrorism on other countries does provide the bare-bone names, dates and places.
--Themes of US capitalist interests (against foreign independence), missionary racism, and empire geopolitics are acknowledged to a certain degree.
--The reporter-style writing and boilerplate assumptions likely improve readability for beginners (what I call "default liberals").
The Bad:
--As other reviewers noted, Kinzer is a reporter for the New York Times (NYT, which has a pathetic record, particularly in foreign policy, as the empire's stenographers and cheerleaders) and provides rather limited understanding of critical geopolitics/political economy (leaving space for status quo assumptions to go unchallenged).
--The chapters where he tries to categorize types of interventions and discusses the "Why's" and "Could Have/Should Have's" are varied in shallowness and absurdity.
--Ex. after going through a century of "interventions" that could just as easily be called terrorism, Kinzer still assumes that US ground troops and perhaps even temporary US military government in Afghanistan is the fallback option. Zero mention of multi-polarity and regionalism (and US imperialism preventing this), i.e. regional diplomatic efforts with actual understanding and responsibility for the area to deal directly with building communities while preventing violence. As if the rest of the world (esp. the coloured Global South) is inherently uncivilized, in desperate need of US democracy-bombs.
The Ugly:
--Kinzer's career of shilling at the NYT for the US military-industrial-complex on current (thus urgent, but clouded by the most "fog of war" propaganda) imperialist interventions has made its mark; Kinzer shows up in Chomsky/Herman's classic Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. In other words, Kinzer is literally an example of imperialist propaganda in the most famous Western book critiquing US propaganda. Round of applause!
--Principled foreign policy journalists do not survive at the NYT, for example: Chris Hedges and .
--With any introductory material where you sacrifice quality for the hope of appealing to a wider audience, the risk is re-enforcing certain status quo assumptions that perpetuate our inability to see the whole picture and imagine systemic change. The bridge from accessible to nuanced critiques is meant to be crossed, not to get stuck on:
1) History of US imperialism:
--A more critical (yet still accessible) intro, by the fabulous : Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
--Vijay on imperialism's ideological censorship: and Chomksy on how this affects the liberal intellegensia (i.e. educated "devoted liberals", rather than the public of "default liberals"): Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
-playlist (featuring , , , , etc.):
-deeper works:
-The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
-The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
-
-The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump
2) Geopolitical Economy of US imperialism:
--Not specific to US: Lenin's famous 1916 intro (Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism) is interesting historically, especially in parallel with 's 1915 essay (how imperialist Scramble for Africa led to WWI).
--To connect to today's imperialism:
i) Accessible historical overview: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
ii) Accessible intro to critical economy theory: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
iii) Magnum opus connecting theory to history: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
iv) Dive into US's monetary imperialism ("dollar hegemony"): Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance (interview: )
v) Debates:
-A Theory of Imperialism
-The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time
February 25, 2008
Overthrow made me realize how poor my education of US history is, and saddly my foreign policy understanding as well. I am shocked that I hadn't learned about some of these coups in, say, my foreign policy to Latin America class in college or any one of my other international relations courses. This is an excellent primer for anyone who wants to understand current world events and why "they" might possibly hate "us."
August 1, 2014
Kinzer writes well and knows how get the reader to keep turning the pages. He is at his best when he is putting together individual stories of little known characters who played decisive roles in the history of US interventions. The book is worth it for these stories and for the characters that Kinzer unearths. But Kinzer tries to play two other roles for which he, as a former reporter, simply does not have the skills.
What happens when news turns into patterns? Answer: then it is no longer news. When what seems like a new event becomes part of a pattern, then we have ventured into social theory. As much as I envy their writing, their story telling, and their eye for individuals, I also feel bad for former reporters. Most of them are trained to recognize events and don’t know what to do when faced with patterns. As a hopeful social theorist, Kinzer wants to line up all the US interventions and show us a pattern. Each of his three sections (“Imperial Era,� “Covert Action,� and “Invasions�) ends with a chapter where he tries his hand at social theory. He moves, that is, from events to patterns. Mostly he fails for reasons I will discuss shortly.
Kinzer’s third mode is as an adjudicator. He decides, as white bearded God sitting up high with lightening bolts, which interventions were worth it (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Grenada, Panama, and Afghanistan) and which weren’t (Philippines, Cuba, Honduras, Guetamala, Iran, Vietnam, and Chile). (I remained unclear about his position on Iraq.) The problem is that he leaves these decisions untheorized. And frankly this leaves him looking rather simple minded to those of us who have dedicated some energy to just such theorizing. Of course, he is, as they say, entitled to his opinion. But interventions in Third world countries are perhaps more than a matter of which flavor of ice-cream one likes, which films are good, or which style of music one prefers. The likely sad truth is that you and I have probably spent more energy theorizing ice-cream, films, and musical styles than Kinzer has spent on his adjudicating US interventions.
Kinzer’s major flaw, I think, is that he cannot help needing to deliver some good news to his readers. Whereas those, such as Chomsky, Zinn, and Churchill, make a commitment to cataloging US interventions and displaying their damage, Kinzer, like Joshua Moravchik and Max Boot, wants to support some of these interventions. I am not sure whether he does this out of conviction or as a strategy to keep from losing what he imagines is his typical US reader. In the conclusion, though, the defense of US intervention drops out. Here Kinzer makes the realist point (quoting Thucydides) that power corrupts even, and perhaps especially, those who believe naively in their own exceptionalism. This is an important point. But the point is made at some cost.
The cost is an overemphasis on individuals, actions, and events over patterns, systems, and structures; a porous and vapid defense of the occasional super-power intervention; and a framework that treats its readers as children who need morals to their stories.
The stories are great. If they can be excised from Kinzer’s shallowness and placed within a richer frame, then this book can be useful. Otherwise I'd rather have the bald faced frontal defenders of empire (Murivchik, Boot) or those who do not to hesitate to point to empire’s indefensibility (Chomsky, Churchill).
What happens when news turns into patterns? Answer: then it is no longer news. When what seems like a new event becomes part of a pattern, then we have ventured into social theory. As much as I envy their writing, their story telling, and their eye for individuals, I also feel bad for former reporters. Most of them are trained to recognize events and don’t know what to do when faced with patterns. As a hopeful social theorist, Kinzer wants to line up all the US interventions and show us a pattern. Each of his three sections (“Imperial Era,� “Covert Action,� and “Invasions�) ends with a chapter where he tries his hand at social theory. He moves, that is, from events to patterns. Mostly he fails for reasons I will discuss shortly.
Kinzer’s third mode is as an adjudicator. He decides, as white bearded God sitting up high with lightening bolts, which interventions were worth it (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Grenada, Panama, and Afghanistan) and which weren’t (Philippines, Cuba, Honduras, Guetamala, Iran, Vietnam, and Chile). (I remained unclear about his position on Iraq.) The problem is that he leaves these decisions untheorized. And frankly this leaves him looking rather simple minded to those of us who have dedicated some energy to just such theorizing. Of course, he is, as they say, entitled to his opinion. But interventions in Third world countries are perhaps more than a matter of which flavor of ice-cream one likes, which films are good, or which style of music one prefers. The likely sad truth is that you and I have probably spent more energy theorizing ice-cream, films, and musical styles than Kinzer has spent on his adjudicating US interventions.
Kinzer’s major flaw, I think, is that he cannot help needing to deliver some good news to his readers. Whereas those, such as Chomsky, Zinn, and Churchill, make a commitment to cataloging US interventions and displaying their damage, Kinzer, like Joshua Moravchik and Max Boot, wants to support some of these interventions. I am not sure whether he does this out of conviction or as a strategy to keep from losing what he imagines is his typical US reader. In the conclusion, though, the defense of US intervention drops out. Here Kinzer makes the realist point (quoting Thucydides) that power corrupts even, and perhaps especially, those who believe naively in their own exceptionalism. This is an important point. But the point is made at some cost.
The cost is an overemphasis on individuals, actions, and events over patterns, systems, and structures; a porous and vapid defense of the occasional super-power intervention; and a framework that treats its readers as children who need morals to their stories.
The stories are great. If they can be excised from Kinzer’s shallowness and placed within a richer frame, then this book can be useful. Otherwise I'd rather have the bald faced frontal defenders of empire (Murivchik, Boot) or those who do not to hesitate to point to empire’s indefensibility (Chomsky, Churchill).
May 26, 2022
It is about time to reread this book that documents the USA's "involvement" in many of the governments of the Western Hemisphere.
I offer two observations:
1. If any reader thinks that there is no precedent for what Vladimir Putin is doing to Ukraine, this book will shock you.
2. It was only a short time after the Peace of Paris settled the American Revolution when France faced its own colonial revolt in Haiti. When military force failed to quell the revolt, Haiti became a free nation...free in name only. What the French government, financiers and banks exacted from Haiti, dooming this country to poverty and servitude, has been documented in detail by the New York Times in a special section of its Sunday, May 22, 2022 edition.
I offer two observations:
1. If any reader thinks that there is no precedent for what Vladimir Putin is doing to Ukraine, this book will shock you.
2. It was only a short time after the Peace of Paris settled the American Revolution when France faced its own colonial revolt in Haiti. When military force failed to quell the revolt, Haiti became a free nation...free in name only. What the French government, financiers and banks exacted from Haiti, dooming this country to poverty and servitude, has been documented in detail by the New York Times in a special section of its Sunday, May 22, 2022 edition.
March 19, 2019
This is the third book I've read this year on US Empire (The others were The End of the Myth by Grandin and How to Hide an Empire). I am so happy (as someone who comes from one of the countries that has been meddled with consistently by US and UK policymakers) that American writers are starting to really study this history and name it what it is.
This is also the third Kinzer book I've read (I loved All the Shah's Men and The Dulles Brothers). Some of the stories were repetitive, but not too much. It's just amazing to me the hubris and ignorance of overthrowing leaders and then being so uninterested to follow up. The parts about Iraq and Afghanistan policy made me mad all over again.
I really hope that stopping endless war abroad is debated during the 2020 cycle. Obama promised he'd stop and a lot of us believed him, but this book and the others show that it goes way back and it never ends well
This is also the third Kinzer book I've read (I loved All the Shah's Men and The Dulles Brothers). Some of the stories were repetitive, but not too much. It's just amazing to me the hubris and ignorance of overthrowing leaders and then being so uninterested to follow up. The parts about Iraq and Afghanistan policy made me mad all over again.
I really hope that stopping endless war abroad is debated during the 2020 cycle. Obama promised he'd stop and a lot of us believed him, but this book and the others show that it goes way back and it never ends well
December 19, 2008
The American government has consistently invaded sovereign nations and gone to war to defend big business concerns and help corporate America pillage the natural resources of foreign nations. Hawaii was a stable monarchy before the American sugar plantation owners felt they were being prevented from making as much profit as they "deserved" so a coup was instigated and funded by the US government. A disturbing read about the lengths the US government will go to in order to protect the almighty dollar...
September 6, 2015
A good work of history with some frankly abysmal analysis attached. I say it's a good work of history because Kinzer's research clearly does not back up a lot of his claims -- for instance, he states multiple times that people like Jacobo Árbenz or Mohammed Mosaddegh were people who believed in "American" values, while at the same time clearly illustrating that "American" values are a lie and a sham, given our propensity for overthrowing foreign governments and the clear fact that this is not new -- either we've been ethnically cleansing the continent in pursuit of manifest destiny, killing each other over the right to own other people, or carrying out coups against sovereign governments simply because they are protesting the colonial exploitation corporations based in America were carrying out against them.
Honestly, given that this was a very entertaining read that is, as I said, a well-researched piece of history, I was prepared to give it four stars, but the "afterword" or analysis of the last section of the book is so offensively bad that it got bumped down to three [edit: actually writing this paragraph made me so mad I can only give it two in good conscience]. Kinzer states, without apparent irony, that people like George Washington did not hold the view that "everyone could use democracy." Seven pages from the end (so close!) he makes the absolutely baseless claim that people like George Washington would oppose the way we go about "spreading democracy," which utterly ignores the fact that Washington himself cut his military teeth on the wholesale slaughter of indigenous peoples who refused to adapt to the "American" way of life, as did basically every other early president. Ignoring that is an egregious act of colonial erasure that fails to account for the fact that native people weresovereign peoples, with their own forms of government and their own "governing principle," in Washington's own words, and that they were merely "defending [their] interests" against brutal monsters who were intent on exterminating them in order to further their own commercial gain. It's an absurd notion that's the cherry on top of the shit sundae that is the final chapter, a chapter that openly espouses the idea that we should spread our values to the world, but we should be nice about it, and do it more like we did in South Korea or South Africa (what he means by this I honestly have no idea, especially with regards to South Korea) and less like we did with Iran, or Cuba, or North Korea. It's such a mindlessly absurd liberal notion that it soured the entire book for me, which up until the last chapter was a good read with some disappointing bits.
Honestly, given that this was a very entertaining read that is, as I said, a well-researched piece of history, I was prepared to give it four stars, but the "afterword" or analysis of the last section of the book is so offensively bad that it got bumped down to three [edit: actually writing this paragraph made me so mad I can only give it two in good conscience]. Kinzer states, without apparent irony, that people like George Washington did not hold the view that "everyone could use democracy." Seven pages from the end (so close!) he makes the absolutely baseless claim that people like George Washington would oppose the way we go about "spreading democracy," which utterly ignores the fact that Washington himself cut his military teeth on the wholesale slaughter of indigenous peoples who refused to adapt to the "American" way of life, as did basically every other early president. Ignoring that is an egregious act of colonial erasure that fails to account for the fact that native people weresovereign peoples, with their own forms of government and their own "governing principle," in Washington's own words, and that they were merely "defending [their] interests" against brutal monsters who were intent on exterminating them in order to further their own commercial gain. It's an absurd notion that's the cherry on top of the shit sundae that is the final chapter, a chapter that openly espouses the idea that we should spread our values to the world, but we should be nice about it, and do it more like we did in South Korea or South Africa (what he means by this I honestly have no idea, especially with regards to South Korea) and less like we did with Iran, or Cuba, or North Korea. It's such a mindlessly absurd liberal notion that it soured the entire book for me, which up until the last chapter was a good read with some disappointing bits.
May 29, 2019
Kinzer’s Overthrow is a history of the USA taking over countries by overthrowing their governments over the past 125 years. It all began in January 1893 when president Mackinley’s administration supported schemes by planters to take over Hawaii by dethroning the queen. This first overthrow included most of the elements that would characterize later ones: an economic interest by powerful business cartels (in this case, sugar), religious justification (redeeming benighted natives) and geopolitical considerations (a stepping stone to a Pacific empire). Thus did the US break with its former policy of keeping to its own shores and keeping foreign powers away from them. Yet, with the exception of Hawaii, which eventually became a US state (the last so far) and thus achieved order and prosperity (at the expense of its native culture and autonomy), these interventions usually ended up by wrecking the existing order and ushering in decades of instability and mayhem, usually suffered by the local population but often with regional or even global ramifications. In all cases the US was willing to incur significant costs to depose a government for not giving free rein to a powerful corporation or group of corporations, but not so much in investing in building up the country from the wreckage left after the troops left. Central America has been made toxic to this day due to over a century of US dominance. The same may be said by the Philippines, Iran and Afghanistan. Possible exceptions may be Chile and Grenada, although these were stable and orderly places before the overthrow of their leftist regimes and may therefore be seen to have reverted to type. The same may be said of Vietnam, but in that solitary case the locals won. The poster child for non intervention (particularly of the short-sighted, dumb kind) is Iraq, where hundreds of thousands have died and millions have been displaced, overwhelming Europe as refugees and justifying xenophobic parties and isolationist policies. Yet the brutality of Abu Ghraib was preceded by the brutality of the Philippino campaign and the My Lai massacre. The overthrow of nationalistic, progressive presidency of José Santos Zelaya gave rise, decades later, to virulently anti-US Sandinistas. Anticommunist Mossadegh’s overthrow eventually gave rise to ayatollah Homeini and Afghan Najibullah’s communist regime that never attacked the US ended in the reign of the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. Not a stellar record, even if one omits that the Nicaraguans had to live through 40 years of Somoza dictatorship, the Iranians through 25 years of the Shah’s tyranny and the Afghans through 20 years of civil war. The history of US interventions abroad is almost a school text on unintended consequences, on the limits of optimism and of the fragility or order, even of deficient order. Overall, an excellent book.
Want to read
August 25, 2018This book only one century. But it didn't start with Hawaii. Thomas Jefferson changed the regime in Tripoli. The U.S. intervened in other nations 102 times between 1798 and 1895 (, ). Always, U.S. military power has been used to enrich business interests.
Nor are the consequences to the target countries unintended! As says in , Cuba’s “crime� is successfully caring for its people: a virus that could spread, and interfere with corporate plunder. [p. 149] Vietnam was fought to prevent Vietnam from becoming a successful model of economic and social development for the third world. So far we’ve won. [p. 91]
Nor are the consequences to the target countries unintended! As says in , Cuba’s “crime� is successfully caring for its people: a virus that could spread, and interfere with corporate plunder. [p. 149] Vietnam was fought to prevent Vietnam from becoming a successful model of economic and social development for the third world. So far we’ve won. [p. 91]
December 25, 2012
I was going to read this but ended up skimming it instead. Its an interesting topic, but this wasn't a very scholarly attempt. Its also blatantly partial in some rather naive ways.
July 3, 2013
I didn't particularly enjoy this book. Foreign policy isn't really my thing. Just ask my husband, who loves the stuff yet has to witness my eyes glaze over as I involuntarily tune out every time he wants to have a conversation about some foreign-policy type article he read in the paper or The Economist.
I hated the writing style (very repetetive - he needs an excellent editor) and I had a hard time with the one-sided point of view - in particular, I thought Kinzer was extraordinarily freehanded in painting ALL of the 14 (eventually overthrown) leaders as democratically idealistic.
But, Kinzer makes some interesting points, and his takes on these dramatic bits of history are illuminating. I found some chapters absolutely fascinating (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Iran), some not. Also, his summary chapters, in particular, are pretty good, so if you read this I wouldn't blame you if you, like me, skimmed some of the Central and South America chapters and just read the wrap-up chapters at the end of the sections.
I hated the writing style (very repetetive - he needs an excellent editor) and I had a hard time with the one-sided point of view - in particular, I thought Kinzer was extraordinarily freehanded in painting ALL of the 14 (eventually overthrown) leaders as democratically idealistic.
But, Kinzer makes some interesting points, and his takes on these dramatic bits of history are illuminating. I found some chapters absolutely fascinating (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Iran), some not. Also, his summary chapters, in particular, are pretty good, so if you read this I wouldn't blame you if you, like me, skimmed some of the Central and South America chapters and just read the wrap-up chapters at the end of the sections.
June 10, 2007
very odd book detailing the U.S.'s covert efforts to overthrow a dozen governments in the past century, a pretty radical topic, but from a liberal mainstream perspective. hwwaahh??
fails to make obvious conclusions about american empire. instead presents the case that meddling in other countries' affairs is bad for the u.s. government. doh!
fails to make obvious conclusions about american empire. instead presents the case that meddling in other countries' affairs is bad for the u.s. government. doh!
Want to read
May 18, 2018It’s a long list of nations, either invaded or intruded upon. Kinzer believes Americans “psychologically, always been on top�; yet in a “more equal and multipolar world� things may get different. Uneasy?
Kinzer is an American.
Kinzer is an American.
June 21, 2020
"Civilization progresses only when the strongest nations and Army respects the rights and dignity of the weakest" -- Homer
America, as far is Overthrow goes, never gave any regarded for Homer's brilliant submission.
America, as far is Overthrow goes, never gave any regarded for Homer's brilliant submission.
November 3, 2016
In this study of regime change as a tool of foreign policy, Kinzer takes on a very interesting subject but really fails to make his case. Kinzer makes all the right choices in terms of subjects to make his case, but fails utterly to tie them together in any truly meaningful way. Further frustrating is Kinzer's poor grasp of history. He regularly claims that Hawaii was America's first foray into regime change which it was clearly not. Kinzer seems unaware of the misadventures of William Walker in Nicaragua, American intervention in Texas, and the American intervention in California prior to and druing the Mexican War. He also makes claims that the US has used regime change more than any other country, which excludes the imperialst adventures of Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, etc.
Overthrow" is an engrossing history of US "regime change", from the ouster of Hawaii's Queen Liliuokalani to the destruction of Saddam Hussein's government. The author weaves a fascinating tale of America's mostly sordid acts of interference in the affairs of foreign nations and the blowback they often engendered. However, although the author protests that he only wrote this book so our future interventions would be conducted more wisely, it would be hard to come away from this book not thinking that regime change is_always_immoral and deleterious to national interests, a point I would question. I think that this book suffers from a certain logical inconsistency and overly simplistic understanding. Rather than drawing one overriding lesson from our history of interventionism, I think the cases he examines are often so different as to defy comparison. Each case should be studied on its own and logical conclusions drawn from each.
Admittedly, American support for, and active participation in foreign regime change has, more often than not, been pretty ignoble, uninformed and frequently undertaken to benefit private corporations and individuals. Our record in Central America is particularly shameful. I sympathize with Mr. Kinzer's visceral opposition to regime change, and think the vast majority of Americans, of whatever political inclination, would agree that decapitating a sovereign, democratic government so that United Fruit could avoid paying taxes is not a wise, proper or moral use of American power. However, that does not mean that there will never be situations where American national interest might necessitate the overthrow of foreign governments, by intrigue if possible, by war if necessary. It also doesn't mean that regime changes whose motivations are impure and whose implementation is violent necessarily result in negative results for either America or the foreign nation in question. That's where this book's thesis falls apart.
For instance, during the Cold War, the United States and the rest of the free world faced an existential threat from the most murderous, aggressive, inhuman and tyrannical ideology in the history of man: Communism. If that insidious ideology, cloaked in the garb of an angel of light and promising paradise on earth, often tricked huge numbers of ignorant peasants and wool-headed "intellectuals" into supporting their own enslavement- such as in Chile- that was all the more reason to combat it with guns and bombs rather than pamphlets from the Young Americans for Freedom. Would Mr. Kinzer have preferred that we battle Communism expansionism with discussion and logic? In a life and death struggle, you play to win, not earn the respect of liberal journalists and the League of Women Voters. If we misjudged the actual threat from regimes in Iran and Guatemala, that's merely an argument to use our power more wisely, not to forfeit its use entirely. Another challenge to Mr. Kinzer's politics is that the sleazy machinations that resulted in the annexation of Hawaii and the disgusting war of conquest that brought us Puerto Rico ended up bringing undeniable material and political benefits to the natives of those countries, who are today quiet content to live under Yankee "imperialism" and would- and have- rejected independence when given the choice. While I wouldn't have supported either annexation, who's to say that the unintended consequences of leaving those islands alone wouldn't have been worse in the long run than what actually happened?
In my opinion, a few of the relevant lessons that can be learned from this history is that we should not allow paranoia and ignorance to conflate mere nationalism with the ideologies and international movements of our actual enemies. Being leftist or anti-American doesn't necessarily make you a Communist. Being Islamic or authoritarian doesn't necessarily make you al-Quaida. Secondly, different cultures, races and stages of political development call for different approaches. While extending the franchise to Puerto Rico and Hawaii generally pacified those conquered territories, true democracy in nations like Iraq or Egypt either results in anarchy or Islamic rule. Mankind wasn't made on an assembly line. And thirdly, as a democratic republic, we must be ever vigilant to elect leaders who are intelligent enough, and honest enough, not to let themselves be duped into foreign intervention for corporate greed (US agri-giants in Central America), because of media-induced hysteria (the Spanish war), or for foreign interests. A serious threat to the national interest or security of the U.S. must be the high and sole criterion for foreign intervention.
In the second chapter he goes on to say that the Philippines is the first time American soldiers fight overseas, again incorrect. I seem to remember Marines in Tripoli long before.
What had the potential to be a useful and enlightening book on US foreign policy is little more than a angry and historically inaccurate diatribe against the US and its foreign policy. Kinzer makes numerous misleading statements, uses quotes out of context, and assumes that all US foreign policy ventures are dictated by selfish economic interests in general and by corporate robberbarons specifically. Virtually all his villains are Republicans. Oddly, he puts Grover Cleveland on a pedestal as an anti-imperialist---the same guy who signed the Dawes Act into law that led to the loss of vast stretches of land owned by Native Americans.
Misinformation ( ridiculous, if not pathetically predictable):
pg. 276: Kinzer writes that "Bush ignored repeated warnings that devastating attacks [9/11] were imminent." First of all, the so-called "warning" was a presidential daily brief delivered by the CIA on August 6, 2001. Like most, if not all, intelligence it had no specific information about the WTC/Pentagon plots that could have decisively prevented them. And besides, the problems that prevented us from stopping 9/11 were FAR more complex and deeply rooted than Bush "ignoring" a "warning" from the CIA. What nonsense.
pg. 278: Kinzer complains that the 9/11 attacks would never have occurred if the US had not armed and and trained the mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Again, Kinzer makes a predictable and over-simplified claim. The mujahideen of the 1980s were, for the most part, bent on driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Before the Gulf War in 1991 (after the Soviets left), bin Laden was not particularly concerned about America. Only when US troops were deployed to Saudi Arabia did bin Laden begin harboring hatred for the US. Kinzer fails to mention that, other than the US, the mujahideen received substantial support from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. America was not the only country involved.
pg. 279: Kinzer complains that the CIA did nothing to save Abdul Haq from the Taliban during the war there in 2001, even claiming that the CIA did not dispatch armed Predator drones to Haq's location, EVEN THOUGH THE CIA DID. Huh!
In the end, Kinzer blames the failure to catch bin Laden on the Americans' "failure" to send in large numbers of conventional ground troops into Afghanistan, EVEN THOUGH THE SOVIETS TRIED THAT. And how succesful were the Soviets in trying this approach? Huh!!
Kinzer also claims that one of the reasons for the Iraq war was oil and the defense contractor Halliburton (formerly headed by Dick Cheney), which was awarded no-bid contracts for rebuilding oil refineries in Iraq. Kinzer, of course, predictably fails to mention that Cheney was actually forced to divest himself of his Halliburton stock when he became VP, and besides, all of the oil contracts in Iraq went to China and countries that didn't even participate in the invasion.
Overthrow" is an engrossing history of US "regime change", from the ouster of Hawaii's Queen Liliuokalani to the destruction of Saddam Hussein's government. The author weaves a fascinating tale of America's mostly sordid acts of interference in the affairs of foreign nations and the blowback they often engendered. However, although the author protests that he only wrote this book so our future interventions would be conducted more wisely, it would be hard to come away from this book not thinking that regime change is_always_immoral and deleterious to national interests, a point I would question. I think that this book suffers from a certain logical inconsistency and overly simplistic understanding. Rather than drawing one overriding lesson from our history of interventionism, I think the cases he examines are often so different as to defy comparison. Each case should be studied on its own and logical conclusions drawn from each.
Admittedly, American support for, and active participation in foreign regime change has, more often than not, been pretty ignoble, uninformed and frequently undertaken to benefit private corporations and individuals. Our record in Central America is particularly shameful. I sympathize with Mr. Kinzer's visceral opposition to regime change, and think the vast majority of Americans, of whatever political inclination, would agree that decapitating a sovereign, democratic government so that United Fruit could avoid paying taxes is not a wise, proper or moral use of American power. However, that does not mean that there will never be situations where American national interest might necessitate the overthrow of foreign governments, by intrigue if possible, by war if necessary. It also doesn't mean that regime changes whose motivations are impure and whose implementation is violent necessarily result in negative results for either America or the foreign nation in question. That's where this book's thesis falls apart.
For instance, during the Cold War, the United States and the rest of the free world faced an existential threat from the most murderous, aggressive, inhuman and tyrannical ideology in the history of man: Communism. If that insidious ideology, cloaked in the garb of an angel of light and promising paradise on earth, often tricked huge numbers of ignorant peasants and wool-headed "intellectuals" into supporting their own enslavement- such as in Chile- that was all the more reason to combat it with guns and bombs rather than pamphlets from the Young Americans for Freedom. Would Mr. Kinzer have preferred that we battle Communism expansionism with discussion and logic? In a life and death struggle, you play to win, not earn the respect of liberal journalists and the League of Women Voters. If we misjudged the actual threat from regimes in Iran and Guatemala, that's merely an argument to use our power more wisely, not to forfeit its use entirely. Another challenge to Mr. Kinzer's politics is that the sleazy machinations that resulted in the annexation of Hawaii and the disgusting war of conquest that brought us Puerto Rico ended up bringing undeniable material and political benefits to the natives of those countries, who are today quiet content to live under Yankee "imperialism" and would- and have- rejected independence when given the choice. While I wouldn't have supported either annexation, who's to say that the unintended consequences of leaving those islands alone wouldn't have been worse in the long run than what actually happened?
In my opinion, a few of the relevant lessons that can be learned from this history is that we should not allow paranoia and ignorance to conflate mere nationalism with the ideologies and international movements of our actual enemies. Being leftist or anti-American doesn't necessarily make you a Communist. Being Islamic or authoritarian doesn't necessarily make you al-Quaida. Secondly, different cultures, races and stages of political development call for different approaches. While extending the franchise to Puerto Rico and Hawaii generally pacified those conquered territories, true democracy in nations like Iraq or Egypt either results in anarchy or Islamic rule. Mankind wasn't made on an assembly line. And thirdly, as a democratic republic, we must be ever vigilant to elect leaders who are intelligent enough, and honest enough, not to let themselves be duped into foreign intervention for corporate greed (US agri-giants in Central America), because of media-induced hysteria (the Spanish war), or for foreign interests. A serious threat to the national interest or security of the U.S. must be the high and sole criterion for foreign intervention.
In the second chapter he goes on to say that the Philippines is the first time American soldiers fight overseas, again incorrect. I seem to remember Marines in Tripoli long before.
What had the potential to be a useful and enlightening book on US foreign policy is little more than a angry and historically inaccurate diatribe against the US and its foreign policy. Kinzer makes numerous misleading statements, uses quotes out of context, and assumes that all US foreign policy ventures are dictated by selfish economic interests in general and by corporate robberbarons specifically. Virtually all his villains are Republicans. Oddly, he puts Grover Cleveland on a pedestal as an anti-imperialist---the same guy who signed the Dawes Act into law that led to the loss of vast stretches of land owned by Native Americans.
Misinformation ( ridiculous, if not pathetically predictable):
pg. 276: Kinzer writes that "Bush ignored repeated warnings that devastating attacks [9/11] were imminent." First of all, the so-called "warning" was a presidential daily brief delivered by the CIA on August 6, 2001. Like most, if not all, intelligence it had no specific information about the WTC/Pentagon plots that could have decisively prevented them. And besides, the problems that prevented us from stopping 9/11 were FAR more complex and deeply rooted than Bush "ignoring" a "warning" from the CIA. What nonsense.
pg. 278: Kinzer complains that the 9/11 attacks would never have occurred if the US had not armed and and trained the mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Again, Kinzer makes a predictable and over-simplified claim. The mujahideen of the 1980s were, for the most part, bent on driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Before the Gulf War in 1991 (after the Soviets left), bin Laden was not particularly concerned about America. Only when US troops were deployed to Saudi Arabia did bin Laden begin harboring hatred for the US. Kinzer fails to mention that, other than the US, the mujahideen received substantial support from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. America was not the only country involved.
pg. 279: Kinzer complains that the CIA did nothing to save Abdul Haq from the Taliban during the war there in 2001, even claiming that the CIA did not dispatch armed Predator drones to Haq's location, EVEN THOUGH THE CIA DID. Huh!
In the end, Kinzer blames the failure to catch bin Laden on the Americans' "failure" to send in large numbers of conventional ground troops into Afghanistan, EVEN THOUGH THE SOVIETS TRIED THAT. And how succesful were the Soviets in trying this approach? Huh!!
Kinzer also claims that one of the reasons for the Iraq war was oil and the defense contractor Halliburton (formerly headed by Dick Cheney), which was awarded no-bid contracts for rebuilding oil refineries in Iraq. Kinzer, of course, predictably fails to mention that Cheney was actually forced to divest himself of his Halliburton stock when he became VP, and besides, all of the oil contracts in Iraq went to China and countries that didn't even participate in the invasion.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 9, 2020
3.5 stars
There are fourteen chapters in this book covering America’s imperialism and transgressions over the past century. Most of the topics are interesting although the writing from chapter to chapter is a little uneven.
I found the chapter on the 1973 CIA led coup in Chile most fascinating and one of the best researched. I also liked the coverage on the American invasion of Panama.
There are fourteen chapters in this book covering America’s imperialism and transgressions over the past century. Most of the topics are interesting although the writing from chapter to chapter is a little uneven.
I found the chapter on the 1973 CIA led coup in Chile most fascinating and one of the best researched. I also liked the coverage on the American invasion of Panama.
October 27, 2018
Hands down the best book I’ve read in ages. This book is an answer to the question, “why do they hate us?�
Read
December 3, 2021I deserve an award for actually finishing a book I have to write a paper on.
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I really enjoyed this book. It was a fascinating concept and I learned a ton!
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I really enjoyed this book. It was a fascinating concept and I learned a ton!
April 2, 2016
This is a rather uneven read of US history. I sympathize with the author and get what he is doing - namely, describing a variety of rather sordid instances where the US overthrew, undermined, encouraged, aided & abetted regime change.
Not a pretty picture, and for the instances Kinzer covers, I don't doubt his narratives are true.
My problem with the book is the rather arbitrary selection of events, and varied coverage of each. Hawaii leads it off, there is a lot on the small Central American countries that we've pushed around and fiddled with, some on Iran, and of course Iraq.
But to be specific - there is a tinge of politics in this. Sometimes, and mostly, it is the CIA or business interests that seem to be zeroed in on, while the responsibility of Presidents comes and goes. So was it mainly the CIA rogue in Chile, or a directive ordered from the White House? Or in Iran? Or what about Cuba.
I think one would be better off reading specifics on any one of the countries and changes involved to get a deeper understanding.
What is missing besides a true probing of responsibility - Presidents, business interests, rogue agencies, etc. - are a selective set of cases themselves. Why the focus on Granada or Panama (the Noriega case, not the original breaking off of that section of Colombia so we could have a Canal ...), yet not a mention of the US CIA role in the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in Zaire (with our "friend" Mobutu as our consolation prize). Or there is practically just one sentence on our favorite son John F Kennedy's presiding over the ill fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, though plenty of responsibility laid on Presidents that Kinzer doesn't like.
Finally, these incidents and intrigue over 100 years seems to leave out the major context of the times. There was no doubt an ugly period in the imperialist 1890s to World War 1, but it differs a great deal from the ugliness of Cold War geopolitical intrigues from the 1950s to 1989. I don't think Kinzer explains the two times very well and how it affected "whoever" it was that directed some of these actions. Then we move on to the post Cold War period with the 1991 gulf war, the rise of Islamic extremists, etc. All of these larger perspectives play into the tactics and decisions of the foreign policy decisions of the US.
Not a pretty picture, and for the instances Kinzer covers, I don't doubt his narratives are true.
My problem with the book is the rather arbitrary selection of events, and varied coverage of each. Hawaii leads it off, there is a lot on the small Central American countries that we've pushed around and fiddled with, some on Iran, and of course Iraq.
But to be specific - there is a tinge of politics in this. Sometimes, and mostly, it is the CIA or business interests that seem to be zeroed in on, while the responsibility of Presidents comes and goes. So was it mainly the CIA rogue in Chile, or a directive ordered from the White House? Or in Iran? Or what about Cuba.
I think one would be better off reading specifics on any one of the countries and changes involved to get a deeper understanding.
What is missing besides a true probing of responsibility - Presidents, business interests, rogue agencies, etc. - are a selective set of cases themselves. Why the focus on Granada or Panama (the Noriega case, not the original breaking off of that section of Colombia so we could have a Canal ...), yet not a mention of the US CIA role in the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in Zaire (with our "friend" Mobutu as our consolation prize). Or there is practically just one sentence on our favorite son John F Kennedy's presiding over the ill fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, though plenty of responsibility laid on Presidents that Kinzer doesn't like.
Finally, these incidents and intrigue over 100 years seems to leave out the major context of the times. There was no doubt an ugly period in the imperialist 1890s to World War 1, but it differs a great deal from the ugliness of Cold War geopolitical intrigues from the 1950s to 1989. I don't think Kinzer explains the two times very well and how it affected "whoever" it was that directed some of these actions. Then we move on to the post Cold War period with the 1991 gulf war, the rise of Islamic extremists, etc. All of these larger perspectives play into the tactics and decisions of the foreign policy decisions of the US.
January 12, 2011
If you are feeling anti-American and want some fodder to fuel your righteous indignation, look no further. Ever wondered why so many Yanks travel with Canadian flag patches on their rucksacks? Kinzer describes why in painful, explicit detail. Every single page I turned was like torture, but I couldn't look away. The chapter titled 'Despotism and Godless Terrorism' even caught my travel neighbor's eye on a recent flight. The greed and hubris of some of the American leaders described in the book is simply abhorrent. Most of the regime overthrows that Kinzer describes were in some fashion fueled by a myopic obsession with the threat of communism and/or corporation profit. I probably should not fool myself into thinking that things are much different in 2011... Take home message: U.S. intervention destabilizes world politics and leaves those countries lucky enough to warrant invasion, worse off than before.
I have been a little Kinzer obsessed since reading 'Blood of Brothers' during my time in Nicaragua. He is a former New York Times correspondent and he somehow manages to make foreign policy read like an edgy pulp fiction thriller...only replete with terrible TRUE stories of torture and government sanctioned murder all in the name of profit.
I have been a little Kinzer obsessed since reading 'Blood of Brothers' during my time in Nicaragua. He is a former New York Times correspondent and he somehow manages to make foreign policy read like an edgy pulp fiction thriller...only replete with terrible TRUE stories of torture and government sanctioned murder all in the name of profit.
April 28, 2016
Got the book to read the section on Hawai'i. Should have stopped there as I had originally planned. Found the book rather one sided & biased at times. I am sure we have many skeletons in the closet & much to be ashamed for but in light of 9/11, al-Qaeda and now ISIS, the United States is fighting their own terror and daily overthrow plots. Found parts of it very interesting & other parts dull. As others have said some of the claims in this book are very shocking & sensational. Wondering how well the actual facts check out?
October 31, 2022
probably the best book on the topic a liberal could write. could have done without the epilogue stating that the real reason US regime change operations are bad is because it undermines international faith in the american way of life being best for everyone. lol.
June 12, 2024
Kinzer certainly has his opinions, of which some I agree and some I disagree, but this book is still worth reading to understand the base of what the American government is capable of in regards to regime change. Over the twentieth century, the ego and greed of both businessmen-turned politicians and morally righteous idealists have ushered in great waves of anti-Americanism from Managua to Tehran and on to Saigon. Time and time again the U.S. has believed it to be obligated to "spread democracy", the go-to excuse for every administration that wishes to hide its true intentions. However, spreading democracy usually entails overthrowing democratically elected leaders (Arbenz, Mossadegh, Allende) and installing tyrants and incompetents who drag their nations into chaos and subservience.
And why do these nations need an injection of democracy? For the crime of desiring national economic independence. Yet, in a world dominated by Cold War politics, every smaller nation found itself being pushed and pulled between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and striving to strengthen your own people told the CIA that you were ripe for a coup. Then an ideology of terrorism blanketed all foreign policy in the Middle East and became the rallying cry for a Bush administration that had no care for actually building up the Middle East. Rather, they secured their oil agreements, "protected" Israel, and murdered whatever brown people they could. But it's okay, they were terrorists!
So this book is certainly not without fault and does not cover each of these instances with nearly enough depth to make a reader an expert, but that's okay. If you know nothing about these events then this book is a great start. If you're looking for a deeper analysis of the situation in the Middle East in the 80s and beyond, I would look elsewhere. If you're looking for an account of American military action throughout the Caribbean in the first half of the 20th century, I would look elsewhere. This book, while not perfect, does a good job at outlining the horrible means the U.S. government has used to bully, threaten, and outright impose their will on the rest of the world, despite whatever benevolent excuse they give. Most Americans are unfamiliar with a lot of this history, but it is crucial to understand that the U.S. government has lied about its actions many times over, and then will apologize decades later when no one remembers what even happened (which is exactly what they want).
And why do these nations need an injection of democracy? For the crime of desiring national economic independence. Yet, in a world dominated by Cold War politics, every smaller nation found itself being pushed and pulled between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and striving to strengthen your own people told the CIA that you were ripe for a coup. Then an ideology of terrorism blanketed all foreign policy in the Middle East and became the rallying cry for a Bush administration that had no care for actually building up the Middle East. Rather, they secured their oil agreements, "protected" Israel, and murdered whatever brown people they could. But it's okay, they were terrorists!
So this book is certainly not without fault and does not cover each of these instances with nearly enough depth to make a reader an expert, but that's okay. If you know nothing about these events then this book is a great start. If you're looking for a deeper analysis of the situation in the Middle East in the 80s and beyond, I would look elsewhere. If you're looking for an account of American military action throughout the Caribbean in the first half of the 20th century, I would look elsewhere. This book, while not perfect, does a good job at outlining the horrible means the U.S. government has used to bully, threaten, and outright impose their will on the rest of the world, despite whatever benevolent excuse they give. Most Americans are unfamiliar with a lot of this history, but it is crucial to understand that the U.S. government has lied about its actions many times over, and then will apologize decades later when no one remembers what even happened (which is exactly what they want).
March 17, 2018
I've been interested in the history of U.S. for a while, especially the foreign policy, military operations, corporations and finance. This book covers basically all these topics. It is well known that U.S. government has overthrown many legitimate foreign governments back in the history, this book just covers all these operations in sequence, analysis the background and similarities.
It is also interesting to compare U.S. to Soviet Union and Russia. Common belief is that U.S. intervenes in other countries because it wants to liberate suppressed people, promote democracy and wants to do other noble things. And most of the world usually sees U.S. as the good guys - the peacekeepers.
Meanwhile when people and media cover Russia's interventions in other sovereign countries (Afghanistan, Abkhazia, Georgia, Ukraine) then Russia is always seen as the bad guy.
When analyzing and comparing the interventions of U.S. and Russia then they don't actually differ that much. There is usually a hidden agenda behind all these operations and overthrows, just the public opinion has been manipulated more smoothly by the U.S. policymakers.
Of course now, after tens of years of interventions, U.S. is seen as a villain in many parts of the world. And washing all this dirt off is nearly impossible.
It is also interesting to compare U.S. to Soviet Union and Russia. Common belief is that U.S. intervenes in other countries because it wants to liberate suppressed people, promote democracy and wants to do other noble things. And most of the world usually sees U.S. as the good guys - the peacekeepers.
Meanwhile when people and media cover Russia's interventions in other sovereign countries (Afghanistan, Abkhazia, Georgia, Ukraine) then Russia is always seen as the bad guy.
When analyzing and comparing the interventions of U.S. and Russia then they don't actually differ that much. There is usually a hidden agenda behind all these operations and overthrows, just the public opinion has been manipulated more smoothly by the U.S. policymakers.
Of course now, after tens of years of interventions, U.S. is seen as a villain in many parts of the world. And washing all this dirt off is nearly impossible.
March 7, 2021
America is an empire. Empires act in many ways, exerting power and influence (DIME - diplomacy, information, military, and economic) to where they see opportunity, threat, potential. Kinzer explores thirteen different U.S. interventions onto foreign soil, from Hawaii in the 1850's to Afghanistan and Iraq of the 2000's. Definitely mixed outcomes, from good to bad, and can definitely raise the questions of "what if?" and "but for..." as to how things would've been different without US interventions in these areas at those specific times in history. The author explores the common themes of US intervention to include want of military basing, strategic location, opportunity, commercial pressure (think United Fruit in Central America, Anaconda Mining in Chile, BP/Aramco in Iran), fear of communism, and fear of fundamentalist terrorism. I read Kinzer's "All the Shah's Men" about Mossadegh and the US/British involvement in Iran's coup, which is what piqued my interest in this book. This is a faster jump into the multiple interventions the US has had (skipping over WWI and WWII). I think this book is worth the read for a good overview of events and perspective of the American Empire, whether you agree or disagree with reasons or outcome.
November 27, 2019
This narrative history provides an overview of US interventions in foreign countries that led directly to the fall of those countries' governments from the toppling of the Hawaiian monarchy in the late 19th century to the invasion of Iraq. A good starting point for those wanting to dig into some of America's more unsavoury (to put it mildly) foreign policy moves in the past century (and then some), though it could have used more detail and the analysis part was somewhat lacking in places. 3.5/5
October 19, 2024
A helpful, concise survey of American interventions abroad through the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I wish there had been more analysis of the corporate/religious ideology underlying these actions, but recognize Kinder does this well in his other books like The Brothers so readers can go there for that. This book condenses more than a century of foreign policy in 300 pages. If you’ve ever felt like your high school education had obvious gaps regarding America’s regime change operations and you want to fill them quickly without a ton of effort, this is the book for you.
April 8, 2024
This book was for school and it was not bad. This is not my favorite genre but the way Kinzer writes makes it easy to read.
April 2, 2024
The book is split into three parts: Governments America overthrew in the pre-WW2 multi-polar world, governments overthrown in the Cold War era, and modern ‘regime changes� in the unipolar world we live in today. Throughout the book, Kinzer does well retelling the basic facts about the conflicts he focuses on. However, his critiques and commentary reek of American apologetics. In the first section, he doesn’t really question the Monroe doctrine as the basis of American foreign policy, he doesn’t mention multiple instances of regime change that he just ignores, and downplays the impact of American imperialism on places like Hawaii and Puerto Rico. In the second section, Kinzer avoids critiquing the foreign policies like the domino theory that led to disastrous interventions, and hand waves invasions like Granada by saying “American needed a win�. In the final section, Kinzer is writing from 2006 and giving America a pat on the back for the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq very prematurely. In all, this is a good list of the facts of many of America’s crimes, but I’d recommend the wikipedia list of American interventions as a better starting point.
Here’s some quotes that were the worst culprits:
“Most people on the islands, however, are pleased with the way their history has turned out. They enjoy the prosperity and freedom that comes with American citizenship, and especially with statehood. Their experience suggests that when the United States assumes real responsibility for territories it seizes, it can lead them toward stability and happiness. In Hawaii, it did that slowly and often reluctantly. The revolution of 1893 and the annexation that followed undermined a culture and ended the life of a nation. Compared to what such operations have brought to other countries, though, this one ended well.�
This is uttered only a page after he points out that only 10% of the population of Hawaii is Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. So of course a majority of Hawaii’s population is pleased with the way history turned out - they aren’t Hawaiian. A few pages later, Kinzer discusses the resource extraction and spread of unemployment, illiteracy, and disease directly connected to the occupation of Puerto Rico - did the United States not assume real responsibility there?
"As colonial experiments go, American rule over Puerto Rico has been relatively benign. It did not produce the violent backlash that emerged in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Philippines. This is due mainly to the fact that the United States agreed to take direct political responsibility for governing Puerto Rico, rather than ruling it through local clients."
Patently false. I’d recommend “War against all Puerto Ricans� by Nelson A. Denis which discusses the four-year insurgency - where US forces bombed a Puerto Rican town from the air, and attempted assassination of the US president by Puerto Rican nationals.
Despite being a history of American regime change, Kinzer fails to discuss the occupations of Mexico in 1917, Haiti, or the Dominican Republic - all of which had regime change objectives. Kinzer also victim-blames nations ruined by American interventions and crony capitalism. “Honduras today faces a nightmare of poverty, violence, and instability. Hondurans bear part of the blame for this heartrending situation, but Americans cannot escape their share.� The American share was occupations in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924 and 1925, and United Fruit continued to support dictators and coups throughout the 20th century.
“Two facts, however, snarl back at those who condemn this invasion [Granada]. First, there was a possibility, albeit remote, that New Jewel leaders who were crazy enough to massacre their own longtime comrades might also have been crazy enough to commit some outrage against Americans. Second, by 1983 the United States had been seared by a decade of defeats and humiliations, from Saigon to Tehran to Managua. Many Americans were eager to reverse that trend and had voted for Ronald Reagan because he pledged to do so. They wanted a victory. When Marxist fanatics in Grenada gave Reagan a chance to score one, he did not hesitate.�
Yes I understand you condemn this invasion, but did you ever think of the fact that Americans wanted a victory?
“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.�
This quote oddly slips into tacit approval of European colonization?
“Americans who think about and make foreign policy have traditionally been Eurocentric. Most of what they understand about the world comes from their knowledge of European history and diplomatic tradition. They grasp the nature of alliances, big-power rivalries, and wars of conquest. The passionate desire of people in poor countries to assert control over their natural resources, however, has never been an issue in Europe. This hugely powerful phenomenon, which pushed developing countries into conflict with the United States during the Cold War, lay completely outside the experience of most American leaders. Henry Kissinger spoke for them, eloquently as always, after Chilean foreign minister Gabriel Valdés accused him of knowing nothing about the Southern Hemisphere. "No, and I don't care," Kissinger replied.�
“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.�
Unsurprisingly, this book made me angry; America has a long history of making the world a worse place for others. But I had expected that by the late date of 2006 we were done trying to make excuses for it. In true journalistic form, Kinzer takes the neutral stance on America’s history of overthrowing governments. But as pointed out in “The View from Somewhere,� journalistic neutrality only shields the powerful. You would think that after researching and writing a 300 page book about the sins of America in the last century, you would have to at least condemn these acts, not just lukewarmly recount them.
“The American invasion of Afghanistan produced a supremely positive result, the destruction of a regime that had allowed anti-Western terrorists to train and plot freely.�
My problem with the third section can be summed up in this: Copyright 2006. Kinzer is writing about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as if they were complete. This is 15 years before the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban to power, 5 years before the first withdrawal from Iraq, 9 years before the second intervention in Iraq, and 11 years before the second draw down. Without the room for the dust to settle, his positivity for democracy in Afghanistan and mission accomplished in Iraq seems naive at the end of a book chronicling American failures in regime change.
“Americans have a spectacularly successful story to tell the world, and the world, despite its growing resentment of the United States, is still eager to hear it. As American presidents have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in weaponry and other blunt tools, however, they have systematically closed American diplomatic posts, libraries, and cultural centers around the world. During the Cold War, millions of people were exposed to American ideals through this dense information network, and many came to admire the United States deeply. Once the Cold War ended, Americans seemed to believe that they no longer needed to teach anyone about their way of life. They came to accept two great fallacies. First, they assumed that the collapse of Communism would lead people around the world to agree that the American political and economic model was best for everyone. Second, they imagined that their overwhelming military power would allow them to crush any power that dissented from this consensus.�
“If it were possible to control the course of world events by deposing foreign governments, the United States would be unchallenged. It has deposed far more of them than any other modern nation. The stories of what has happened in the aftermath of these operations, however, make clear that Americans do not know what to do with countries after removing their leaders. They easily succumb to the temptation to stage coups or invasions but turn quickly away when the countries where they intervene fall into misery and repression.�
There was a cognitive dissonance to this book that really feels like a relic of the “They hate us because of our freedom� Era post-9/11. Millions were exposed to American ideals, but I also just spent 300 pages outlining the death and destruction we wrought. They admire us - well except for the countries discussed in this book that tried to wrest some control back from US corporations and got coup’d for it. I do wonder what this book would be like written now, nearly 20 years later - and by someone not from America. It would be a vastly different book.
Here’s some quotes that were the worst culprits:
“Most people on the islands, however, are pleased with the way their history has turned out. They enjoy the prosperity and freedom that comes with American citizenship, and especially with statehood. Their experience suggests that when the United States assumes real responsibility for territories it seizes, it can lead them toward stability and happiness. In Hawaii, it did that slowly and often reluctantly. The revolution of 1893 and the annexation that followed undermined a culture and ended the life of a nation. Compared to what such operations have brought to other countries, though, this one ended well.�
This is uttered only a page after he points out that only 10% of the population of Hawaii is Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. So of course a majority of Hawaii’s population is pleased with the way history turned out - they aren’t Hawaiian. A few pages later, Kinzer discusses the resource extraction and spread of unemployment, illiteracy, and disease directly connected to the occupation of Puerto Rico - did the United States not assume real responsibility there?
"As colonial experiments go, American rule over Puerto Rico has been relatively benign. It did not produce the violent backlash that emerged in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Philippines. This is due mainly to the fact that the United States agreed to take direct political responsibility for governing Puerto Rico, rather than ruling it through local clients."
Patently false. I’d recommend “War against all Puerto Ricans� by Nelson A. Denis which discusses the four-year insurgency - where US forces bombed a Puerto Rican town from the air, and attempted assassination of the US president by Puerto Rican nationals.
Despite being a history of American regime change, Kinzer fails to discuss the occupations of Mexico in 1917, Haiti, or the Dominican Republic - all of which had regime change objectives. Kinzer also victim-blames nations ruined by American interventions and crony capitalism. “Honduras today faces a nightmare of poverty, violence, and instability. Hondurans bear part of the blame for this heartrending situation, but Americans cannot escape their share.� The American share was occupations in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924 and 1925, and United Fruit continued to support dictators and coups throughout the 20th century.
“Two facts, however, snarl back at those who condemn this invasion [Granada]. First, there was a possibility, albeit remote, that New Jewel leaders who were crazy enough to massacre their own longtime comrades might also have been crazy enough to commit some outrage against Americans. Second, by 1983 the United States had been seared by a decade of defeats and humiliations, from Saigon to Tehran to Managua. Many Americans were eager to reverse that trend and had voted for Ronald Reagan because he pledged to do so. They wanted a victory. When Marxist fanatics in Grenada gave Reagan a chance to score one, he did not hesitate.�
Yes I understand you condemn this invasion, but did you ever think of the fact that Americans wanted a victory?
“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.�
This quote oddly slips into tacit approval of European colonization?
“Americans who think about and make foreign policy have traditionally been Eurocentric. Most of what they understand about the world comes from their knowledge of European history and diplomatic tradition. They grasp the nature of alliances, big-power rivalries, and wars of conquest. The passionate desire of people in poor countries to assert control over their natural resources, however, has never been an issue in Europe. This hugely powerful phenomenon, which pushed developing countries into conflict with the United States during the Cold War, lay completely outside the experience of most American leaders. Henry Kissinger spoke for them, eloquently as always, after Chilean foreign minister Gabriel Valdés accused him of knowing nothing about the Southern Hemisphere. "No, and I don't care," Kissinger replied.�
“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.�
Unsurprisingly, this book made me angry; America has a long history of making the world a worse place for others. But I had expected that by the late date of 2006 we were done trying to make excuses for it. In true journalistic form, Kinzer takes the neutral stance on America’s history of overthrowing governments. But as pointed out in “The View from Somewhere,� journalistic neutrality only shields the powerful. You would think that after researching and writing a 300 page book about the sins of America in the last century, you would have to at least condemn these acts, not just lukewarmly recount them.
“The American invasion of Afghanistan produced a supremely positive result, the destruction of a regime that had allowed anti-Western terrorists to train and plot freely.�
My problem with the third section can be summed up in this: Copyright 2006. Kinzer is writing about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as if they were complete. This is 15 years before the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban to power, 5 years before the first withdrawal from Iraq, 9 years before the second intervention in Iraq, and 11 years before the second draw down. Without the room for the dust to settle, his positivity for democracy in Afghanistan and mission accomplished in Iraq seems naive at the end of a book chronicling American failures in regime change.
“Americans have a spectacularly successful story to tell the world, and the world, despite its growing resentment of the United States, is still eager to hear it. As American presidents have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in weaponry and other blunt tools, however, they have systematically closed American diplomatic posts, libraries, and cultural centers around the world. During the Cold War, millions of people were exposed to American ideals through this dense information network, and many came to admire the United States deeply. Once the Cold War ended, Americans seemed to believe that they no longer needed to teach anyone about their way of life. They came to accept two great fallacies. First, they assumed that the collapse of Communism would lead people around the world to agree that the American political and economic model was best for everyone. Second, they imagined that their overwhelming military power would allow them to crush any power that dissented from this consensus.�
“If it were possible to control the course of world events by deposing foreign governments, the United States would be unchallenged. It has deposed far more of them than any other modern nation. The stories of what has happened in the aftermath of these operations, however, make clear that Americans do not know what to do with countries after removing their leaders. They easily succumb to the temptation to stage coups or invasions but turn quickly away when the countries where they intervene fall into misery and repression.�
There was a cognitive dissonance to this book that really feels like a relic of the “They hate us because of our freedom� Era post-9/11. Millions were exposed to American ideals, but I also just spent 300 pages outlining the death and destruction we wrought. They admire us - well except for the countries discussed in this book that tried to wrest some control back from US corporations and got coup’d for it. I do wonder what this book would be like written now, nearly 20 years later - and by someone not from America. It would be a vastly different book.
October 19, 2019
The prolonged debacle in the middle east is not, sadly, an exception in modern American foreign policy. Since the late 19th century, the powers that be in DC have repeatedly looked abroad � both with honest avarice and with idealistic dreams of remaking the world in an Empire of Liberty. In Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer delivers a review of its actions, beginning with the seizure of Hawaii, covering seemingly every country in central and South America save Brazil, and ending up in the Ozymandian wastes of Afghanistan and Iraq, delivered with a slightly journalistic flair.
Because of the popularity of books like those penned by Howard Zinn, some of these adventures are not as unknown as they once were. Popular ignorance about the events, however, is chronic. When Cuba and Iran roiled in revolution and their people spoke of previous interference from America, few in the United States knew what they meant � even American leadership. The scales of American involvement in the countries detailed here � places as small as the isle of Grenada, and as large a Afghanistan � vary from clandestine coups arranged by the CIA, to outright invasions. The interventions often happen in connection with “helping� the people in the target country, either to save them from themselves (Cuba, the Phillipines), to secure democracy (Hawaii, Iraq), or to prevent worse evils from occurring (most of Central and South America). Teddy Roosevelt’s role in interventionist wars is no surprise, but Eisenhower arguably accounts for more. Considering how he warned the American people about a military-industrial complex driving all too much of public policy, that comes as something of a surprise. Eisenhower invariably got involved in these outside adventures out of fear of the Soviet Union’s rising influence, however, and it’s possible that he realized he was manipulated in retrospect, and based his warning on that. This is only speculation on my part, however.
I mentioned Howard Zinn earlier, because his history published decades before exposed more Americans than ever to the bare facts of these events, and Kinzer does not go into that much more detail. What he has is documented, but in tone it struck me as more of a newspaper-esque expose in book form than a work of history, making the regime-change events more dramatic than necessary by having DC attack men on false pretenses every single time. This kind of foreign intervention can still be argued against even when the persons targeted are objectively awful human beings; it isn’t necessary to make them angels first. Frankly, I’ve been a bit wary about Kinzer since he revealed he keeps a portrait of the dictator Ataturk in his office.
While Americans definitely need to be more aware of their government’s history in this regard � both to guard against future excursions and to understand why there might be resentment between our neighbors and ourselves � Overthrow doesn’t quite suit the task.
Because of the popularity of books like those penned by Howard Zinn, some of these adventures are not as unknown as they once were. Popular ignorance about the events, however, is chronic. When Cuba and Iran roiled in revolution and their people spoke of previous interference from America, few in the United States knew what they meant � even American leadership. The scales of American involvement in the countries detailed here � places as small as the isle of Grenada, and as large a Afghanistan � vary from clandestine coups arranged by the CIA, to outright invasions. The interventions often happen in connection with “helping� the people in the target country, either to save them from themselves (Cuba, the Phillipines), to secure democracy (Hawaii, Iraq), or to prevent worse evils from occurring (most of Central and South America). Teddy Roosevelt’s role in interventionist wars is no surprise, but Eisenhower arguably accounts for more. Considering how he warned the American people about a military-industrial complex driving all too much of public policy, that comes as something of a surprise. Eisenhower invariably got involved in these outside adventures out of fear of the Soviet Union’s rising influence, however, and it’s possible that he realized he was manipulated in retrospect, and based his warning on that. This is only speculation on my part, however.
I mentioned Howard Zinn earlier, because his history published decades before exposed more Americans than ever to the bare facts of these events, and Kinzer does not go into that much more detail. What he has is documented, but in tone it struck me as more of a newspaper-esque expose in book form than a work of history, making the regime-change events more dramatic than necessary by having DC attack men on false pretenses every single time. This kind of foreign intervention can still be argued against even when the persons targeted are objectively awful human beings; it isn’t necessary to make them angels first. Frankly, I’ve been a bit wary about Kinzer since he revealed he keeps a portrait of the dictator Ataturk in his office.
While Americans definitely need to be more aware of their government’s history in this regard � both to guard against future excursions and to understand why there might be resentment between our neighbors and ourselves � Overthrow doesn’t quite suit the task.
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