Overthrow History Paper - Essay Example

Ultimately, the US loses interest in the target countries, allowing corruption or terrorism to flourish. Another pattern we can look at is the history of U.S.A mediation in governments around the world.  Kinzer’s starts with what he notes as the first American intervention in a foreign country, an intervention whose known aim was to collapse that government: the case of Hawaii, 1893. Hawaii was then an autonomous state ruled by a sovereign, Queen Liliuokalani. Kinzer facts the various political and economic motives behind this early example of American military power, or merely the threat of it, being ultimately used to destabilize and ultimate overthrow a foreign power that was not deemed to be complying with U.S. interests.

Kinzer is careful to outline the economic imperatives that are so often at the root of political upheavals; in the case of Hawaii, it is white concern in the enormous profits to be made from sugar. The relation among economic and political forces as they played out in the case of Hawaii at the end of the 19th century set the pattern, Kinzer argues, for the several interventions that would go after over the next 100 years. Fast-forward to the assault of Iraq in 2003: as Kinzer notes, “Giant American Corporations stood to make huge profits from this conflict and its aftermath.

” Among the main beneficiaries were Halliburton, Bechtel, and the Carlyle Group, all with ties to the Bush management and all major contributors to Bush’s presidential campaigns.  He tells the narration of the bold politicians, spies, military commanders, and commerce executives who took it upon themselves to depose royals, presidents, and prime ministers. He also shows that the U.S.A administration has often pursued these operations with no understanding the countries involved; as a result, many of them have had disastrous long-term effects.

In a convincing and offensive history that takes readers to fourteen countries, including Cuba, Iran, South Vietnam, Chile, and Iraq, Kinzer surveys current American history from a new and often startling perspective. Justification for regime changes in places The control that economic power exercises over American foreign policy had grown extremely since the days when determined planters in Hawaii realized that by bringing their islands into the United States, they would be able to send their sugar to markets on the mainland without paying import duties.

As the twentieth century progressed, titans of trade and their advocates went a step beyond influencing policy makers; they became the policy makers. The stature who most perfectly embodied this merging of political and economic interests was John Foster Dulles, who spent decades operational for some of the world’s most powerful corporations and then became secretary of state. Dulles ordered the 1953 coup in Iran, which was intended in part to make the Middle East safe for American oil companies.

A year later he ordered another coup, in Guatemala, where a nationalist government had challenged the power of United Fruit, a company his old law firm represented. Having marshalled so much public and political support, American corporations found it relatively easy to call upon the military or the Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA) to defend their privileges in countries where they ran into trouble. They might not have been able to do so if they and the presidents who cooperated with them