A Century of Regime Change in America - Essay Example

Day Time Houston Community College “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq” - + Stephen Kinzer’s Analysis of U.S. Foreign Policy Stephen Kinzer has emphasized in his book analyzing “a century of regime change” in American foreign policy that he views this process as a “continuum” and the latest invasion of Iraq is the “culmination” of this historical evolution. (Kinzer, 2006) Kinzer begins the analysis by examining the manner through which the sovereign and independent Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown and progressively annexed by the United States. While Hawaii is often associated with the projection of U.S. military power abroad through the use of military bases that extend the range of the Navy and Air Force, Kinzer shows how corporate interests, particularly related to the sugar industry, worked together with both the Presidential administration and military forces to establish a new government in Hawaii, protect it militarily through the deployment of Marine forces, and then to give it official recognition over the indigenous Hawaiian government led by the Queen, essentially enacting “regime change”. (Kinzer, 2006) Kinzer suggests that minority corporate interests related to the sugar industry drove the policy, but that this also was part of the broader goals of the imperial era where many industrialized nations sought to extend their influence globally through a combination of trade, military occupation, colonization, and natural resource exploitation. Another critical aspect Kinzer identifies is what can be called the “land grab” where corporate interests such as those related to the sugar plantations acquired vast tracts of land from indigenous peoples using dishonest means cloaked in legality. The next main example Kinzer gives is the manufacturing of consent for war in the style of “yellow journalism” is Cuba, as related to the sinking of the Lusitania. Kinzer suggest that again sugar interests were a driving force, but behind the sugar trade the more sinister aspects of late 19th Century capitalism that were represented elsewhere in America. This is the era of the great Robber Barons, Carnegie, Morgan, Frick, Rockefeller, and the founders of modern finance and industrialization in America. Kinzer focuses more on the wider imperial forces that drive this era, such as the Spanish-American war, Cuba, the Philippines, and early intervention in the “Banana Republics” all as examples of the imperial drive that were driven by the urge to dominate other nations and indigenous groups through trade, land grabs, and natural resource exploitation. Kinzer shows how the aspects of the trade can shift from profit being centralized in sugar to huge new business opportunities opening up through oil drilling, mining, timber, or mass-production of consumer goods in assembly line factories. These aspects of late 19th Century capitalist exploitation is shown by Kinzer to be the driving force of American foreign policy as it operates in Nicargua, Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, and other nations during this era. What Kinzer shows is that if the aspects of capitalist exploitation change to favor one industry over another, U.S. policy will also change the theater of operations and influence to represent the focus on the pursuit of that profit. To some degree, America makes various attempts to take-over aspects of the Spanish, French, and English empires both in North America and internationally. (Grossmann, 2011) In other examples, the U.S. fights territorial wars with Mexico historically, as well as with England, France, and Spain in the Colonial era as it expands from 13 colonies on the East Coast to the annex all of the Indian land in the West. In short, I felt that Kinzer also needed to include the broader themes from the Colonial era, the Western expansion, and the “Indian Wars” into his analysis for a more complete discussion of historical forces. In depicting a type of “Robber Baron” capitalism at the root of the American imperial spirit, Kinzer attempts to show also how it interweaves with political influence in Washington in the construction of U.S. foreign policy. The conclusion is a direct application to the problems that exist in American politics today, namely the influence of large corporate and private capitalist interests on the construction of foreign policy and the use of military around the world. In between the classic, modern imperial era and what can be described as the post-Vietnam “oil wars,” Kinzer shows the repeated market interest of American corporations and more importantly their ownership interests who represented the vast concentration of wealth in society as having undue influence, or “corrupting” the ideals of traditional America. This is an attempt to reconcile what many view as the idealism of the Founding Father’s in America with the practice of foreign policy, which has led to over 14 examples of regime change and other human rights violations repeatedly over a period of 110 years of history. While Kinzer holds an intrinsic bias against the corruption that he sees leading American policy astray, the focus on economics and private corporate interest are an example of the “follow the money” methodology that suggests these interests benefited the most from the policies, and they did so in a manner that was not equally distributed in the society. Furthermore, these patterns of foreign policy regime change represented a refusal to extend civil, political and human rights to the indigenous peoples equally, as a root aspect of racism. Following Kinzer’s analysis, the Cold War era, its paranoia, nuclear proliferation, and wars such as Korea and Vietnam can be seen as based in the need to preserve this system of capitalist “exploitation” from national liberation movements based in Marxism and Communist-Socialist ideologies. Kinzer’s analysis follows broad Marxist lines of interpretation such as Lenin’s deconstruction of imperialism, yet he does not advocate Marxist ideologies or solutions, but rather a reform of American policy to become consistent with the ideals of the Founding Fathers. Through this analysis, the excesses of corporate capitalism may have led to the corruption of government policy throughout this period, and the main evidence of that is the concentration of profits by a minority ownership in America who profited the most from the policies implemented. In this regard, I feel that Kinzer’s analysis should also include more information about the influence of the Military-Industrial Complex, as its rise in many ways can be seen as related to the same root causes of capitalist greed and protection of minority interest. Kinzer sees a type of reform required where American foreign policy is more honest in actually helping the people around the world build democratic societies, rather than in establishing “Banana Republics,” dictators, and proxy States that claim democratic values but represent and enable a minority capitalist interest to exploit labor, natural resources, and trade imbalances through the dominant powers of industrialization and militarization. From Kinzer’s view, American foreign policy fails to live up to the ideals of democracy, and implementing a more pure or altruistic form of democracy is the goal of policy reform, rather than Marxist solutions. This is important because in following a primarily Marxist interpretation of “imperialism based upon capitalist greed” he also posits a type of “humanist” solution where a more just application of the ideals represented in the human rights declarations (and American Constitution) are ideally implemented without the corruption and bias of undue corporate interest, or the moral hazard of capitalist greed leading to war. If Iraq is the “culmination” of this 110 year process of American imperialism as Kinzer states, then he seems to imply that either a downside or change is inherent in this analysis, despite not really explaining where that will come from. In this regard, is Libya the next culmination, and Iran the next culmination, and so forth, or is there some aspect that will change this policy? Kinzer never really answers this question but implies that people understanding history in this manner of interpretation will somehow be able to band together (“organize”) and implement some type of moral reform of the system and foreign policy based upon a historical understanding of capitalist greed. Unfortunately, modern politics in America shows little sign of changing from the 110-year pattern Kinzer describes. Bibliography: Grossman, Zoltán, "A BRIEFING ON THE HISTORY OF U.S. MILITARY INTERVENTIONS"; Z magazine, 2011, available from http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html; Internet; accessed 24 April 2011 Kinzer, Stephen, Overthrow: Americas Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq; Times Books; First Edition, 2006. Kinzer, Stephen and Goodman, Amy, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq; Democracy Now!, April 21, 2006, available from http://www.democracynow.org/2006/4/21/overthrow_americas_century_of_regime_change; Internet; accessed 29 April 2011 Read More