INTRODUCTION

The Camel Not in the Quran


THE ARGENTINE WRITER Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that the lack of camels in the Quran proves its Middle Eastern provenance: only a native author, he explained, could have so taken the animal for granted as not to mention it.1 Perhaps a similar familiarity explains the absence of Latin America in discussions about U.S. history. Though Latin America has played an indispensable role in the rise of the United States to global power, it elicits little curiosity from its neighbor to the north. “Latin America doesn’t matter,” Richard Nixon advised a young Donald Rumsfeld, who was casting about for career opportunities. “Long as we’ve been in it, people don’t give one damn about Latin America.”2 “People don’t give one shit” about the place, Nixon said.3 Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, agreed. “You come here speaking of Latin America,” he told Chile’s foreign minister in 1969, after the minister’s visit to the White House, “but this is not important. Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance.”4

Were it not for Borges’s insight, this studied indifference to Latin America would seem ironic, for the region was where the United States first learned how to project its power, where it worked out effective and flexible tactics of extraterritorial administration, established legal precedents, and acquired its conception of itself as an empire like no other before it. The Western Hemisphere was to be the staging ground for a new “empire for liberty,” a phrase used by Thomas Jefferson specifically in reference to Spanish Florida, Cuba, and the Spanish lands west of the Mississippi. Unlike European empires, ours was supposed to entail a concert of formally equal, sovereign democratic American republics, with shared interests and values, led but not dominated by the United States—a conception of world power that, after World War II, became the guiding vision of the Washington foreign policy establishment.

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The history of the United States in the region—of gunboat bombing, invasions, mercenary wars, covert actions, regime changes, and psyops—is extensive. It includes well-known coups in Guatemala and Chile and less famous interventions. As early as 1826, Washington’s first envoy to Mexico, Joel Poinsett, used his social contacts as a member of the York Freemason lodge to undermine the Mexican government, which was led by politicians who were members of a rival Scottish Freemason lodge.5 This was the first of many times when Washington would use nongovernmental civil society organizations to destabilize Latin American governments. Also in the 1820s, the United States started regularly sending heavily armed ships into Caribbean, Mexican, and South American ports, often landing troops, occasionally destroying port towns, and annexing small islands, needed by the United States’ growing navy as coaling stations.6

The U.S. military sharpened its fighting skills and developed its modern-day organizational structure largely in constant conflict with Spanish America. In the 1840s, the United States waged a two-year, deadly war against Mexico that ended with Washington taking a third of Mexican territory, including California. The United States then went on to annex Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines, along with an archipelago of other islands and atolls, and turn Cuba into an informal colony. The administration of Theodore Roosevelt helped separate Panama from Colombia to build a canal. The U.S. military occupied and waged counterinsurgencies in Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Philippines.

Between 1898 and 1989, the United States either orchestrated or provided key support to at least forty successful regime changes in Latin America.7 Legal precedents established during the early years of U.S. military intervention in Spanish America continue to this day to be cited by presidential administrations to argue for broad, unaccountable powers to launch preemptive wars, to invade and bomb countries without congressional authority, to deny prisoners basic rights granted under the Geneva Convention, to subject them to torture, and to hold them indefinitely in places like Guantánamo and try them in courts in which prosecutor and judge are all members of the U.S. military. For their part, U.S. corporations and financial houses came to dominate the economies of Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, as well as large parts of South America, apprenticing themselves in overseas expansion before they headed elsewhere, to Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Washington’s first attempts to restructure another country’s economy took place in Mexico in the years after the U.S. Civil War and in Cuba following the Spanish-American War of 1898.8 “We should do for Europe on a large scale,” remarked the U.S. ambassador to England in 1914, “what we did for Cuba on a small scale and thereby usher in a new era of human history.”

Latin America was the launching pad for the U.S. overseas banking industry, which now, more than ever, dominates the international economy. When Congress in 1913 passed the Federal Reserve Act and allowed U.S. banks to open branches in foreign countries, the president of the National City Bank of New York, Frank Vanderlip, moved quickly. Vanderlip, who had lobbied for the act, established operations first in Argentina, then Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Cuba. Within but a few years, National City, with British and German financial power in decline after World War I, became the primary source of capital for U.S. and foreign investors in Latin America. By 1919, National City was “the largest international bank in the world,” having, in that year alone, opened thirty-three new Latin American branches (twenty-two of them in Cuba).9

National City moved next into Europe and then into European colonies, in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. “We would revolutionize the world,” Vanderlip said, capturing the exuberance of his own company’s dizzying ascent in Latin America.10

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It is commonplace to say that the United States is an empire in denial. Denied is the cost in human suffering of intervention. Denied also are the consequences of intervention. Denial is doctrinal. For more than a century, the Monroe Doctrine—first announced in 1823 by President James Monroe, telling European empires to keep out of the Western Hemisphere, to forsake their efforts to recolonize the New World—justified, in the name of anti-interventionism, one intervention after another. By 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt read the anti-colonial Monroe Doctrine as if it were a colonial riot act, claiming that Monroe’s writ granted the United States an “international police power” to respond to “chronic wrongdoing” in the Western Hemisphere.

Denial is ritualized. “America has never been an empire,” said George W. Bush in 1999, in his run for the White House, a claim that nearly all aspirants to the presidency have to recite in one form or another. Bush won that election. Then, after the terrorist attacks that took place on September 11, 2001, against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he launched the United States into a global war, which included the invasion and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. By now, denial had become rote. “We don’t do empire,” Bush’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld said, just after the start of the Iraq War, to a reporter who asked him if the United States was engaged in “empire building” in the Middle East. “We’re not imperialistic,” Rumsfeld, then on a tour of the Gulf States, said. “We never have been.”

“I can’t imagine why you’d even ask the question,” Rumsfeld said.

Why? indeed. Observers, both foreign and domestic, have long been fascinated by the persistence of the kind of American innocence expressed by Rumsfeld: that we are all Adam, we are all Jay Gatsby, that America, the United States, “was bound to get ahead”—and to get ahead not like Europe got ahead, with the prop of empire, but on its own. It’s an enduring myth, and to understand its origins one must consider that camel Borges says isn’t in the Quran: Latin America, and the way Latin America has shaped the United States in both peace and war.

Latin America is often called Washington’s “backyard,” a place where the United States could practice, at will, the kind of interventionism described above. That descriptor misses the region’s importance to the evolution of U.S. power.11 A better metaphor would be a “workshop,” or a training ground, where the United States could regroup during periods of retrenchment, where ascendant governing coalitions could work out new tactics and new worldviews, in response to changing times.

Political theorists divide the history of the United States into a series of presidential coalitions—among them, the Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, Progressives, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Dealers, and Ronald Reagan’s New Rightists—each brought into power by major electoral realignments.12 What’s often left out of this history of political succession is foreign policy. The ability to project power abroad has a utility that goes well beyond matters related to economics and security. In a nation like the United States, constituted since its founding by relentless expansion, the coalition that had dominated foreign policy has dominated domestic politics.

A primary task of U.S. foreign policy, apart from ensuring defense, accessing resources, and opening markets, is to establish hegemony—hegemony not over other nations but within the United States. It’s in the imaginative realm of foreign policy where ideas concerning how best to organize society get worked out; where contradictions—between ideals, interests, social groups—get reconciled. Politicians, economic elites, and opinion makers don’t have to agree on what, exactly, Washington needed to do abroad. They just have to agree that Washington had the power, and the right, to do something abroad, which allowed for a coming together of competing perspectives and divergent interests.

In this, Spanish America has been key. Jeffersonians fantasized about extending their Empire for Liberty across Spanish North America, and down into the Caribbean, and the decaying Spanish Empire gave the founders of the United States a chance to work out their nation’s first “grand strategy”: In 1786, Thomas Jefferson worried that Spain was “too feeble” to hold on to the “great continent” and might lose it to a more powerful European empire, either Great Britain or France. He advocated that Washington shore up the Spanish, “till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain” the continent “from them piece by piece.”13

And so it went. Federalists imagined the New World as a large commercial emporium, with New England its manufacturing headquarters. The Jacksonians built their coalition by sharpening their racism, and their ideological defense of slavery, in opposition to Spanish-American republicanism.14 Confederates thought they could save slavery by expanding its reach into Central and South America. Progressives worked out their ideas concerning free trade, morality, race, and the ability of other nations for self-governance by waging wars and presiding over military occupations in the Caribbean and Central America (as well as the Philippines).


Copyright © 2021 by Greg Grandin