A Break in the History of the
excerpted from the book
America's Century of Regime Change
from Haiti to Iraq
by Stephen Kinzer
Times Books, 2006, paper
historian Charles Beard
"A free opportunity for expansion in foreign markets is
indispensable to the prosperity of American business. Modern diplomacy
is commercial. Its chief concern is with the promotion of economic
For at least a century, many people in the United States had believed
it was their "manifest destiny" to dominate North America.
Most cheered when, in 1898, they were told that this destiny was
now global and entitled them to influence and dominate lands beyond
their own shores. An outspoken band of idealists, however, denounced
this change of national course as a mean-spirited betrayal of
the American tradition. Among these protesters were university
presidents, writers, several titans of industry including Andrew
Carnegie, clergymen, labor leaders, and politicians of both parties,
including former president Grover Cleveland. They condemned America's
interventions abroad, especially the war against nationalist guerrillas
in the Philippines, and urged Americans to allow other nations
the right to self-determination that they themselves so deeply
cherished. One of these critics, E. L. Godkin the crusading editor
of The Nation, lamented that by new standards, no one was considered
a "true-blue American" who harbored "doubts of
the ability of the United States to thrash other nations; or who
fails to acknowledge the right of the United States to occupy
such territories, canals, isthmuses or peninsulas as they may
think it is desirable to have, or who speaks disrespectfully of
the Monroe Doctrine, or who doubts the need of a large navy, or
who admires European society, or who likes to go to Europe, or
who fails, in case he has to go, to make comparisons unfavorable
This kind of talk drove expansionists
to distraction. Theodore Roosevelt denounced Godkin as "a
malignant and dishonest liar." The anti-imperialist's as
a group, he wrote in a letter to his friend Lodge, were "futile
sentimentalists of the international arbitration type" who
exhibited "a flabby type of character which eats away at
the great fighting features of our race." On another occasion
he described them as "simply unhung traitors."
The first wave of American "regime change" operations,
which lasted from 1893 to 1911, was propelled largely by the search
for resources, markets, and commercial opportunities. Not all
of the early imperialists, however, were the tools of big business.
Roosevelt, Lodge, and Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan were moved by
what they considered to be the transcendent imperatives of history.
Expanding, they believed, was simply what great nations did. In
their minds, promoting commerce and defending national security
fused into what one historian has called "an aggressive national
egoism and a romantic. attachment to national power." They
considered themselves nothing less than instruments of destiny
Americans have a profoundly compassionate side. Many not only
appreciate the freedom and prosperity with which they have been
blessed but fervently wish to share their good fortune with others.
Time and again, they have proved willing to support foreign interventions
that are presented as missions to rescue less fortunate people.
When President McKinley said he was going
to war in Cuba to stop "oppression at our very doors,"
Americans cheered. They did so again a decade later, when the
Taft administration declared that it was deposing the government
of Nicaragua in order to impose "republican institutions"
and promote "real patriotism." Since then, every time
the United States has set out to overthrow a foreign government,
its leaders have insisted that they are acting not to expand American
power but to help people who are suffering.
This paternalism was often mixed with
racism. Many Americans considered Latin Americans and Pacific
islanders to be "colored" natives in need of guidance
from whites. In a nation whose black population was systematically
repressed, and where racial prejudice was widespread, this view
helped many people accept the need for the United States to dominate
After Franklin Roosevelt became president of the United States
in 1933, he decided that the Machado dictatorship had become an
embarrassment and encouraged the Cuban army to rebel. It did so,
and out of the ensuing turmoil emerged a sergeant named Fulgencio
Batista. By the mid-1930s he was master of Cuba, and he shaped
its fate for most of the next quarter century.
Batista broke diplomatic relations with
the Soviet Union, cracked down on the Communist Party, and invited
American military advisers to train his army. He later encouraged
American investors, including prominent gangsters, to build what
became a spectacularly lucrative tourism industry based on prostitution
and casino gambling. His most lasting legacy, however, may have
been his cancellation of the congressional election that was to
have been held in 1952. Among the candidates was Fidel Castro,
a charismatic young lawyer and former student leader. Castro might
have gone on to a career in electoral politics, but after Batista's
coup made that impossible, he turned to revolution.
For an astonishingly long time, American
policy makers deluded themselves into believing that all was well
in Cuba. In 1957 the National Security Council reported that Cuban-American
relations faced "no critical problems or difficulties."
A year later Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence
Agency, told a congressional hearing that there was no likelihood
of Soviet influence growing anywhere in Latin America. Blithe
assurances like these suggest the shock that many Americans, especially
those in Washington, felt when Batista fled the country on January
1, 1959, a few steps ahead of Castro's rebels.
The day after Batista's flight, Castro
descended from his mountain stronghold to Santiago, the city that
the Americans had prevented General Calixto Garcia from entering
at the end of the Spanish-American War. In the central plaza,
which is named for Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, another nineteenth-century
rebel leader, Castro made his first speech as leader of the victorious
revolution. He said nothing about his political plans but made
a solemn promise. It was one that would have puzzled most Americans,
but it thrilled the Cuban soul.
This time the revolution will not be frustrated!
This time, fortunately for Cuba, the revolution will achieve its
true objective. It will not be like 1898, when the Americans came
and made themselves masters of the country.
The Cuban revolution, and especially Castro's
turn toward anti-Yankee radicalism, baffled most Americans. Few
had any idea of how the United States had treated Cuba in the
past, so naturally they could not understand why Cubans wished
so fervently to break out of the American orbit. Many were astonished,
just as their grandparents had been in 1898, to learn that "liberated"
Cubans were ungrateful to the United States. President Dwight
Eisenhower was among the baffled:
Here is a country that, you would believe
on the basis of our history, would be one of our real friends.
The whole history... would seem to make it a puzzling matter to
figure out just exactly why the Cubans and the Cuban government
would be so unhappy when, after all, their principal market is
here, their best market. You would think they would want good
relationships. I don't know exactly what the difficulty is.
Castro's government confiscated foreign
corporations, banned capitalist enterprise, and steered Cuba into
a close alliance with the Soviet Union. In 1961, exiles sponsored
by the CIA invaded Cuba in an attempt to depose him but failed
miserably. Eighteen months later, after the Soviets deployed offensive
missiles in Cuba, Soviet and American leaders brought their countries
to the brink of nuclear combat in the most terrifying showdown
of the Cold War. Successive American presidents vowed to bring
Castro down, and at several points the CIA tried to kill him.
He not only survived but devoted much of his life to undermining
United States interests from Nicaragua to Angola. That made him
an icon of anti-Americanism and a hero to millions around the
Castro was a pure product of American
policy toward Cuba. If the United States had not crushed Cuba's
drive to independence in the early twentieth century, if it had
not supported a series of repressive dictators there, and if it
had not stood by while the 1952 election was canceled, a figure
like Castro would almost certainly not have emerged. His regime
is the quintessential result of a "regime change" operation
gone wrong, one that comes back to haunt the country that sponsored
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson began a major escalation of
the American war effort in Vietnam, giving Subic Bay and Clark
a greater strategic importance than ever. In that same year, an
ambitious politician named Ferdinand Marcos was elected president
of the Philippines. The combination of these two factors-the bases'
growing importance and the emergence of Marcos-shaped the next
quarter century of Philippine history.
During Marcos's two four-year terms as
president, dissatisfaction with his callous indifference to the
injustices of Filipino life set off a series of armed rebellions.
In 1971 he declared that since only a strong government could
contain the growing insurgencies that his misrule provoked, he
had no choice but to impose martial law. He closed Congress, suspended
the constitution, canceled the forthcoming presidential election,
and ordered the arrest of thirty thousand opposition figures.
For the next fourteen years, he ran one of the most corrupt regimes
in Asia. Through a maze of government-protected cartels and monopolies,
he and his comrades stole billions of dollars. The country, which
had been progressing slowly toward prosperity and freedom, slid
backward into repression and poverty.
None of the American presidents who dealt
with Marcos during his period of absolute power held him in much
esteem. His personal and political style repelled Richard Nixon.
Jimmy Carter could not abide the campaigns of torture, rape, and
murder by which he maintained his regime. Ronald Reagan, who had
a warm spot for anti-Communist dictators, heard complaints about
him from American businessmen who could no longer make money in
the Philippines because the ruling clique was taking it all. Despite
these reservations, however, the United States maintained its
friendship with Marcos until the end. It gave his regime billions
of dollars in military aid, much of which he spent on violent
campaigns against both rebel insurgencies and peaceful opposition
movements. The reason was clear. Clark Air Base and Subic Bay
Naval Station had become foundations of American military power
in Asia, and the United States was willing to do whatever was
necessary to hold on to them.
Corazon Aquino, who became president after Marcos fled, returned
to her people the civil rights and public freedoms Marcos had
taken from them. Her government failed to make substantial progress
toward resolving the country's huge social and economic problems,
but restoring democracy was not its only achievement. It also
negotiated an epochal agreement with the United States that led
to the closing of American military bases in the Philippines.
The last American soldiers left Clark and Subic Bay at the end
The story of Washington's rule over the
Philippines, first direct and then indirect, is above all one
of lost opportunity. Americans waged a horrific war to subdue
the islands at the beginning of the twentieth century, but once
they won, their brutality ended. They did not impose murderous
tyrants the way they did in much of Central America and the Caribbean.
The parliamentary election they organized in 1907, although hardly
democratic by modern standards, was the first of its kind in Asia.
In the years that followed, they treated their Asian subjects
no worse than the British did, perhaps better than the Dutch treated
Indonesians, and certainly better than the Japanese treated people
in the countries they occupied during World War II. When France
was fighting to hold on to Indochina in the 1950s, the United
States had already granted independence to the Philippines.
During their decades of power in the Philippines,
however, Americans never sought to promote the kind of social
progress that might have led the country toward long-term stability.
As in other parts of the world, Washington's fear of radicalism
led it to support an oligarchy that was more interested in stealing
money than in developing the country. The United States did bequeath
to the Filipinos a form of democracy, but when the archipelago
was finally allowed to go its own way, in the 1990s, it was as
poor as it was unstable.
Nearly a decade passed between the time the United States subdued
the Philippines and its next "regime change" operation.
During that time, it adjusted its approach. President Taft adopted
a policy he called "dollar diplomacy," under which the
United States brought countries into its orbit through commercial
rather than military means. He assured foreign leaders that they
had nothing to fear as long as they allowed free rein to American
businesses and sought loans only from American banks. The first
to reject those conditions was President José Santos Zelaya
Nicaraguans remember Zelaya as a visionary
who dared to imagine that his small, isolated country could reach
greatness. His sins-impatience, egotism, an autocratic temperament,
and a tendency to mix public funds with his own-were and are common
traits among leaders in Central America and beyond. Few others,
however, have matched his reformist passion or his genuine concern
for the downtrodden.
Nicaraguans never accepted their country's role as a protectorate
the United States. At the end of 1912, Benjamin Zeledón,
a fervent admirer of Zelaya, launched a futile but heroic rebellion.
He died while fighting the United States Marines. Among those
who saw his body being dragged to a cemetery near Masaya was a
teenager named Augusto César Sandino. It was a decisive
"Zeledon's death," Sandino later
wrote, "gave me the key to understanding our country's situation
in the face of Yankee piracy."
Fourteen years later, with United States
Marines still occupying his country, Sandino launched a rebellion
of his own. At first the State Department sought to dismiss his
guerrillas as a "comparatively small body" made up of
"lawless elements" and "ordinary bandits."
That view became steadily harder to sustain, and finally, in 1933,
President Herbert Hoover decided the United States had shed enough
blood in Nicaragua and ordered the marines home.
With the Americans gone, Sandino agreed
to talk peace. He traveled to Managua under a guarantee of safe
conduct, and in remarkably short order agreed to end his rebellion
and rejoin the country's normal political life. That settled the
matter for everyone except the ambitious young commander of the
American-created National Guard, General Anastasio Somoza Garcia.
He correctly saw Sandino as a threat to his ambitions and arranged
for him to be assassinated. Soon afterward, General Somoza seized
the presidency for himself.
Shortly before Sandino was killed, he
prophesized that he "would not live much longer," but
said that was fine because "there are young people who will
continue my fight." He was quite right. In 1956 an idealistic
young poet assassinated President Somoza. Soon afterward, a group
called the Sandinista National Liberation Front, named for Sandino,
launched a rebellion against the dynastic Somoza dictatorship.
It seized power in 1979, formed an alliance with Fidel Castro's
Cuba, and proclaimed a nationalist program that directly challenged
American power. President Ronald Reagan responded by sponsoring
another round of war in Nicaragua's mountains and jungles. This
turned Nicaragua into a bloody battlefield of the Cold War. Thousands
of Nicaraguans died in a conflict that was in part a proxy fight
between the United States and Cuba. American-sponsored rebels
did not achieve their main goal, the overthrow of the Sandinista
regime, but in 1990, two years after the war ended, Nicaraguans
voted the Sandinistas out of office. The country remained deeply
polarized, however, and one of the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.
In few countries is it possible to trace
the development of anti-American sentiment as clearly as in Nicaragua.
A century of trouble between the two nations, which led to the
death of thousands and great suffering for generations of Nicaraguans,
began when the United States deposed President Zelaya in 1909.
Benjamin Zeledon took up arms to avenge him. Zeledón's
death inspired the young Sandino, who, in turn, inspired the modern
For all his faults, Zelaya was the greatest
statesman Nicaragua ever produced. If the United States had found
a way to deal with him, it might have avoided the disasters that
followed. Instead, it crushed a leader who embraced capitalist
principles more fully than any other Central American of his era.
That terrible miscalculation drew the
United States into a century of interventions in Nicaragua. They
took a heavy toll in blood and treasure, profoundly damaged America's
image in the world, and helped keep generations of Nicaraguans
in misery. Nicaragua still competes with Haiti to lead the Western
Hemisphere in much that is undesirable, including rates of poverty,
unemployment, infant mortality, and deaths Lm curable diseases.
In 1958 the Liberal Party ... finally returned to power [in Honduras].
Its leader, Villeda Morales, took over a country in which United
Fruit was the biggest company, the biggest landowner, and the
biggest private employer. He called it "the country of the
seventies-seventy percent illiteracy, seventy percent illegitimacy,
seventy percent rural populations, seventy percent avoidable deaths."
Villeda tried to pass a land reform law, but was forced to withdraw
it under intense pressure from United Fruit. When his term was
about to expire in 1963, the Liberal candidate who was nominated
to succeed him vowed to revive the law, and also to curb the power
of the army. That combination disturbed some powerful Hondurans.
Ten days before the election, the army staged a coup, installed
General Oswaldo Lopez Arellano in the presidency, dissolved Congress,
and suspended the constitution. Military officers ruled Honduras
for the next eighteen years. During this period, the fruit companies'
grip on the country weakened
Honduras held its next election in 1981, and Roberto Suazo Cordova,
a country doctor and veteran political infighter, emerged as president.
True power, however, remained with the military, specifically
with the highly ambitious army commander General Gustavo Alvarez.
That suited the United States, because Alvarez was a fierce anti-Communist
who detested the Sandinista movement that had recently come to
power in neighboring Nicaragua. When the Reagan administration
asked him to turn Honduras into a base for anti-Sandinista rebels,
known as contras, he eagerly agreed. Soon hundreds of contras
were operating from camps along the Nicaraguan border, and thousands
of American soldiers were flying in and out of the ballooning
Aguacate air base nearby. From 1980 to 1984, annual United States
military aid to Honduras increased from $4 million to $77 million.
Once again, it had surrendered its national sovereignty to Americans.
Rivals forced General Alvarez from power
in 1984 but did not dismantle his repressive machine. It had two
purposes: supporting the contras and repressing dissent within
Honduras. To achieve this latter goal, the army established a
secret squad called Battalion 3-16, trained and supported by the
CIA, that maintained clandestine torture chambers and carried
out kidnappings and killings. The most powerful figure in the
country during this period was the American ambassador, John Negroponte,
who studiously ignored all pleas that he try to curb the regime's
While the contra war raged, progress toward
democracy in Honduras was impossible and citizens faced a frightening
form of government-sponsored terror. The war had another effect,
which did not become clear until years later. Thousands of poor
Honduran families, submerged in grinding poverty and fearful of
the military, fled the country during the 1980s. Many ended up
in Los Angeles. There, large numbers of Honduran teenagers joined
violent street gangs. In the 1990s many of these youths were deported
back to Honduras, where they faced the same lack of opportunity
that had forced their parents to flee. Soon they established in
their homeland a replica of the bloody gang culture they had absorbed
in Los Angeles.
These awful turns in Honduran national
life were in part the result of United States intervention, and
they symbolize the unimaginable consequences that "regime
change" operations can have. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, Americans deposed a government in Honduras in order to
give banana companies freedom to make money there. For decades,
these companies imposed governments that crushed every attempt
at national development. In the 1980s, when democracy finally
seemed ready to emerge in Honduras, the United States prevented
it from flowering because it threatened the anti-Sandinista project
that was Washington's obsession.
... the United States has been the overwhelming force in Honduran
life for more than a century.(Second) 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.
"All that this country desires is that the other republics
on this continent be happy and prosperous, and they cannot be
happy and prosperous unless they maintain order within their boundaries
and behave with a just regard for their obligations toward outsiders."
Nationalists reflexively rebel against governments they perceive
as lackeys of foreign power. In the twentieth century, many of
these rebels were men and women inspired by American history,
American principles, and the rhetoric of American democracy. They
were critical of the United States, however, and wished to reduce
or eliminate the power it wielded over their countries. Their
defiance made them anathema to American leaders, who crushed them
time after time.
The course the United States followed
brought enormous power and wealth but slowly poisoned the political
climate in the affected countries. Over a period of decades, many
of their citizens concluded that democratic opposition movements
had no chance of success because the United States opposed them
so firmly. That led them to begin embracing more radical alternatives.
If the elections of 1952 in Cuba had not been canceled, and if
candidates like the young Fidel Castro had been allowed to finish
their campaigns for public office and use democratic institutions
to modernize Cuba, a Communist regime might never have emerged
there. If the United States had not resolutely supported dictators
in Nicaragua, it would not have been confronted with the leftist
Sandinista movement of the 1980s.
In the quarter century before 1898, much of the world suffered
through a series of economic crises. The United States was not
exempt, passing through depressions or financial panics in the
mid-1870s, mid-1880s, and early 1890s. Political leaders saw overseas
expansion as the ideal way to end this destructive cycle. They
believed it would answer the urgent questions raised by two epochal
developments that changed the United States at the end of the
nineteenth century: the closing of its frontier and the greatly
increased production of its farms and factories. Successive presidents
embraced the "open door" policy, which they described
as a way of bringing all nations into a global trading system.
It might better have been called "kick in the door,"
because in reality it was a policy of forcing foreign nations
to buy American products, share their resources with the United
States, and grant privileges to American businesses, whether they
wanted to or not.
American leaders clamored for this policy
because, they said, the country desperately needed a way to resolve
its "glut" of overproduction. This glut, however, was
largely illusory. While wealthy Americans were lamenting it, huge
numbers of ordinary people were living in conditions of severe
deprivation. The surplus production from farms and factories could
have been used to lift millions out of poverty, but this would
have required a form of wealth redistribution that was repugnant
to powerful Americans. Instead they looked abroad.
By embracing the "open door"
policy, the United States managed to export many of its social
problems. The emergence of markets abroad put Americans to work,
but it distorted the economies of poor countries in ways that
greatly increased their poverty. As American companies accumulated
vast sugar and fruit plantations in the Pacific, Central America,
and the Caribbean, they forced countless small farmers off their
land. Many became contract laborers who worked only when Americans
needed them, and naturally came to resent the United States. At
the same time, American companies flooded these countries with
manufactured goods, preventing the development of local industry.
The first American "regime change"
operations had effects that rippled across the country and around
the world. Within the United States, they brought together a nation
that was still divided by the legacy of the Civil War; secured
the power of the sensationalist press, especially its most ardent
exponent, William Randolph Hearst; and convinced most Americans
that their country was destined for global leadership. They also
robbed Americans of an important measure of their innocence. The
scandal over torture and murder in the Philippines, for example,
might have led Americans to rethink their country's worldwide
ambitions, but it did not. Instead, they came to accept the idea
that their soldiers might have to commit atrocities in order to
subdue insurgents and win wars. Loud protests followed revelations
of the abuses Americans had committed in the Philippines but,
in the end, those protests faded away. They were drowned out by
voices insisting that any abuses must have been aberrations and
that to dwell on them would show weakness and a lack of patriotism.
American presidents justified these first
"regime change" operations by insisting that they wanted
only to liberate oppressed peoples, but in fact all these interventions
were carried out mainly for economic reasons. The United States
annexed Hawaii and the Philippines because they were ideal stepping-stones
to the East Asia trade; took Puerto Rico to protect trade routes
and establish a naval base; and deposed the presidents of Nicaragua
and Honduras because they refused to allow American companies
to operate freely in their countries. In none of these places
was Washington prepared for either the challenges of rule or the
anger of nationalists.
Why did Americans support policies that
brought suffering to people in foreign lands? There are two reasons,
so intertwined that they became one. The essential reason is that
American control of faraway places came to be seen as vital to
the material prosperity of the United States. This explanation,
however, is wrapped inside another one: the deep-seated belief
of most Americans that their country is a force for good in the
world. Thus, by extension, even the destructive missions the United
States embarks on to impose its authority are tolerable. Generations
of American political and business leaders have recognized the
power of the noble idea of American exceptionalism. When they
intervene abroad for selfish or ignoble reasons, they always insist
that in the end, their actions will benefit not only the United
States but also the citizens of the country in which they are
intervening-and, by extension, the causes of peace and justice
in the world.
Two other facts of geopolitical life emerge
from the history that Americans made between 1893 and 1913. One
is the decisive role that presidents of the United States play
in shaping the course of world events. There is no limit to the
number of "what if" scenarios to which this evident
fact can give rise. If the anti-imperialist Grover Cleveland had
not lost the election of 1888 to Benjamin Harrison (Cleveland
won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College), the United
States would certainly not have supported a revolution against
the monarchy in Hawaii. If someone other than William McKinley
had been president in 1898, he might have decided to set Cuba
and the Philippines on the path to independence after the Spanish-American
War. If the strongly probusiness William Howard Taft had not won
the presidency in 1908 and named the corporate lawyer Philander
Knox as secretary of state, Washington might not have insisted
on crushing the Zelaya government in Nicaragua and, with it, the
hope for modernization in Central America. Since presidents can
so decisively shape the fate of foreign nations, it is no wonder
that non-Americans sometimes wish they could vote in American
A second fact that jumps from the history
of this era is the absolute lack of interest the United States
showed in the opinions of the people whose lands it seized. American
leaders knew full well that most Hawaiians opposed the annexation
of their country but proceeded with it anyway. No representative
of Cuba, the Philippines, or Puerto Rico was present at the negotiations
in Paris that ended the Spanish-American War and sealed their
countries' fates. In Nicaragua and Honduras, even American diplomats
conceded in their dispatches to Washington that the Liberal reform
project was far more popular than the oligarchic regimes the United
States imposed. The idea that the victorious power should listen
to public opinion in these countries would have struck most Americans
as absurd. They believed Latin Americans and Asians to be as they
were portrayed in editorial cartoons: ragged children, usually
nonwhite, who had no more idea of what was good for them than
a block of stone.