Empire’s Workshop: Latin America and the Roots of U.S. Imperialism.
By Greg Grandin. Review here:
...Grandin's more distinctive contribution lies in documenting Latin America's role as a staging ground for the rise of militaristic idealists within the Republican Party. For decades, Republicans derided the moralizing of Democratic diplomacy, with its talk of democracy, development, and human rights. Instead, they advocated the hard-nosed realism most famously associated with Henry Kissinger. Yet despite his acclaim within Nixonian circles, Kissinger found himself under attack in the late-1970s not only by liberals, but also by Ford administration colleagues like Chief of Staff Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, as well as by highly ideological "New Right" hawks like Robert Kagan and Paul Wolfowitz.
These conservatives were united in their view that a strong moral vision should guide U.S. action in the world. They believed that the use of the country's military power should not be limited by a chastened, post-Vietnam anti-interventionism that had spread through the American public, the Congress, and much of the armed forces. Seeking to fashion a new conservative idealism, they felt vindicated by the soaring rhetoric adopted by candidate Ronald Reagan. Yet, once in office, Reagan largely maintained a Kissinger-style pragmatism with regard to the Soviet Union and China.
In this context, Grandin argues, Latin America became critical for the New Right not because of its geopolitical significance, but for its lack of it. The region afforded the administration an "opportunity to match its actions with its rhetoric." Hard-liners could be put in charge there because "[u]nlike the Middle East, Central America had no oil or other crucial resources. Unlike Southeast Asia, the region was in America's backyard--the USSR would not support the Sandinistas or the rebels in El Salvador or Guatemala to the degree it did its allies in Vietnam. 'The eagle that kills the deer in Central America,' declaimed national security scholar Robert Tucker, 'will not frighten the bear in the Middle East.'"...
Currently I'm reading False Dawn by John Gray. Very good book. (I have to admit I saw it on the site of the best blogger out there, Billmon. It's great to see him back to fulltime blogging. If only the MSM were half as good.)
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