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

This well-written and engaging book asks Latin Americanists to reconsider our now traditional ways of thinking about the motives of U.S. interventionism in Latin America during the Cold War. While acknowledging the importance of economic and strategic motives, Grow argues that U.S. partisan politics and international political considerations were of greater importance and seldom had much to do with the actual situation within the country targeted for intervention. The source of the author’s revisionist ideas about U.S. policymaking in Latin America is his examination of the papers from U.S. presidents and their close advisors relative to eight major interventions between Guatemala in 1954 and Panama in 1989.

The author focuses on the political roots of interventionist policy, which he sees essentially as domestic and international political theater being acted out on the stage of international anti-communism. Behind this were fears of sustaining political losses, frequently not so much to the communist bloc as to domestic political adversaries. Thus the Eisenhower administration took on the reformist governments of Arévalo and Arbenz in Guatemala, not because tiny Guatemala could possibly threaten U.S. security or even because of the complaints of the United Fruit Company and the Guatemalan elite, but because the Eisenhower campaign had lam-basted Truman for having “lost” China. Whether Guatemala was becoming communist or not and whether the country presented an actual threat or not, public perception of the situation seemed to demand an intervention, particularly in light of upcoming U.S. midterm elections in 1954. Worse, if there were a communist takeover in Guatemala it would open the Eisenhower administration and the Republican Party to charges of having “lost” another country to communism. U.S. officials also believed that if they allowed a communist or communist-influenced government in Guatemala that the international community, both allies and adversaries such as the Soviet Union, would see the Eisenhower administration as weak. At the same time, it would weaken U.S. ties to its allies in Latin America and Asia (both the sites of U.S.-led anti-communist military pacts) and the Middle East.

Toward the end of the Eisenhower administration, Vice President Richard Nixon pushed desperately to launch the CIA invasion of Cuba before the November 1960 presidential election, fearing a loss to John F. Kennedy, who was vigorously campaigning against the Eisenhower-Nixon administration for “losing Cuba.” Ironically, after winning the election, Kennedy felt that his campaign rhetoric forced him, despite his strong doubts, to carry out the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, a loss which the president subsequently believed hurt him domestically and called the resolve of the United States into question internationally. He compensated by taking a hard line against the independent socialist leader of Guyana, Cheddi Jagan, whose ouster led to rueful consequences for that new country. According to Grow, similar domestic and international political considerations were major factors in all the subsequent U.S. Cold War interventions, including the Dominican Republic in 1965 (where, Lyndon Johnson believed, a leftist/communist victory might have led to the defeat of his Great Society Program in the U.S. Congress), Chile in 1973, Nicaragua and Grenada in the earlier 1980s, and Panama in 1989.

This book makes a valuable contribution to our discussions of U.S. interventions (and foreign policy generally) by reminding us that the overarching motivations for policy, strategic, and economic concerns are just part of a mix of factors that can all be powerfully important and which ultimately are interrelated. I emphasize the last point as a gentle criticism of the book. In my view the author sometimes places too much emphasis on the political factors as separate from the strategic and economic, a tendency especially evident in his very narrow definition of the concept of strategic in the conclusion. A second problem concerns footnoted quotations...