U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War (review)

This short but provocative book reads best as an extended interpretive essay on the domestic and international politics of U.S. intervention in Latin America during the Cold War, advancing an important, though inadequately theorized, argument about the nature of executive power and U.S. hegemony. Grow surveys U.S. covert or overt intervention in Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961), British Guiana (1963), the Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1973), Nicaragua (1981), Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989)—the outlier, given that Manuel Noriega was a right-wing dictator rather than the leader of a radical nationalist or Marxist movement. In each case, Grow argues, U.S. presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George Herbert Walker Bush decided to intervene not primarily in response to economic or security imperatives but on the basis of domestic political calculations, concerns about the symbolic credibility of American power, and appeals by local and regional opponents of the targeted regimes.

Grow marches mechanically through each intervention. In similar fashion, he describes the regimes as they came to power, their growing economic and political radicalism, the concerns that they raised in Washington and among domestic and regional opponents, the symbolic threat that each posed to the domestic and international credibility of presidents at a moment of political vulnerability, and the short-term political payoff that the decision to intervene provided. In British Guiana, the site of one of the least known (at least in the United States) cia covert operations, President Kennedy in 1963 authorized a destabilization program that forced the avowedly Marxist Cheddi Jagan and his People's Progressive Party (PPP) from power the following year, despite British willingness to accommodate the regime. Although U.S. intelligence identified Jagan as a security threat and fretted that British Guiana might become a "second Cuba," Grow argues that Kennedy viewed Guiana "almost exclusively as a domestic political problem" (69), especially in light of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the neutralization of Laos, and Republican Party and media criticism that the young president was insufficiently tough on Communism. Similarly, he suggests, President Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada and the overthrow of a radical faction of the New Jewel Movement (NJM) in part to restore his own political credibility in the wake of the disastrous October 1983 bombing of U.S. military barracks in Beirut, deflect public opposition to his Central America policies, and avoid a potentially damaging hostage crisis.

According to Grow, U.S. officials were generally correct in gauging the radical politics and goals of the regimes that they overthrew, but nearly always wrong in asserting Soviet control of—or even great interest in—local communist parties. He concludes that none of these regimes posed any national security threat to U.S. interests despite the overblown assertions of policymakers. More important, he insists, was the symbolic importance of Jacobo Arbenz, Jagan, Fidel Castro, Salvadore Allende, the Sandinistas and others as alternative models of development or as manifestations of the imagined declining credibility of U.S. power in the eyes of Moscow and regional or European allies. In several cases (Guatemala, Guiana, Chile, Nicaragua, and Grenada), moreover, local elites and neighboring regimes pressed the case for U.S. intervention to serve their own purposes.

This book confirms the insights of scholars who have stressed the agency of local actors in shaping U.S. policy, ascribed foreign-policy shifts to the results of domestic political conflicts triggered by foreign crises, and emphasized the symbolic credibility of American power and the executive branch in shaping threat perceptions. Interventions on the periphery, in Grow's rendering, represent less the policing of the unstable hegemonic realm than the periodic, symbolic, flexing of political and military power as itself a function of hegemony—as well as the by-product of America's uniquely (for a democracy) militarized domestic politics.

Grow did no new original research for this book, but he took fruitful advantage of...