Customer Reviews

Intervention and Revolution (Meridian)

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A sharp little book that explains much about the American foreign policy path after the Second World War. It helps to have a familarity with the events which the book deals but it is not strictly necessary. The book does have a liberal slant, which is to be expected since the author co-founded the Institute for Policy Studies. But slant is not necessarily bias, and it does not detract from the overall analysis. Highly recommended for those interested in History, Public Policy and Political Science.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Insurgency_Revolution/Intervention_Revolution.html

Some Excerpts:

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Unlike the leaders of developed nations, the enemies which revolutionary leaders see are not at the gate but already inside. Their country is occupied either by a foreign colonial power or by local landlords, generals, or self-serving politicians. As they see it, the issue is liberation. The goal is a radical redistribution of political and economic power to overcome centuries of political oppression and crushing poverty. The means is seizure of political power.
... the revolutionary idea-that radical change is necessary, that it is inevitable, and that it can come only by seizing the machinery of the state-has steadily grown.
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Revolutionary movements grow in the soil of exploitation and injustice.
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The historic aim of revolution, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out, is freedom, the opportunity to participate in the political process.

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The United States government has seized upon the moral ambiguity of revolution to justify a global campaign to contain it, to channel it into acceptable paths, or to crush it. In 1938, President Roosevelt had to summon all his political powers to block the Ludlow Resolution for a constitutional amendment forbidding the President to send troops overseas without a national referendum. Less than ten years after its narrow defeat, his successor secured broad congressional support for use of American military power to put down violent revolution abroad. "We cannot allow changes in the status quo," the President declared, "by such methods as coercion, or by such subterfuges as political infiltration," making clear that it didn't matter whether revolutionaries were natives of the country they wished to change or not. Since violence is the engine of political change over most of the globe, President Truman committed the United States to a prodigious task.

The context of the Truman Doctrine made it perfectly clear that its target was not all "violence" or all "coercion" or all "changes in the status quo," but only those having something to do with "communism." The justification for treating communist revolutions as a unique political phenomenon rested partly on the premise that they were manipulated by the Soviet Union and partly on the dogma that the coming of communism to a society meant the end of its political evolution. It was assumed that once the "iron curtain'' descended upon a country, history stopped. It was lost forever, trapped in an ideological straitjacket. In the twenty years since the war, we have seen the fallacy of this latter assumption. Romania Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself have undergone profound political and social change. They are still communist regimes, but their character has evolved in many important ways, far more radically, certainly, than many right-wing dictatorships that have come to power by military coup but are exempt from the Truman Doctrine.

The word "communist" has been applied so liberally and so loosely to revolutionary or radical regimes that any government risks being so characterized if it adopts one or more of the following policies which the State Department finds distasteful: nationalization of private industry, particularly foreign-owned corporations, radical land reform, autarchic trade policies, acceptance of Soviet or Chinese aid, insistence upon following an anti-American or nonaligned foreign policy, among others. Thus, the American ambassador to Cuba at the time of the brief Grau San Martin government in 1933 found it to be "communistic." In 1937 Cordell Hull privately spoke of the Mexican government, which was nationalizing U.S.-owned oil properties, as "these communists down there," but made no public charge. Since the Second World War, however, the term "communist" has been used to justify U.S. intervention against a variety of regimes with widely differing ideologies and relationships with the Soviet Union, including Arevalo's Guatemala, Mossadeq's Iran Goulart's Brazil, Sukarno's Indonesia, Caamano's Dominican revolutionary junta, as well as insurgent movements in Latin America Africa, and Southeast Asia.
Indeed, from the Truman Doctrine on, the suppression of insurgent movements has remained a principal goal of U.S. foreign policy. It has been the prime target of the U.S. foreign-assistance program, most of the funds for which have gone for civic-action teams, pacification programs, support for local police, and, above all, military aid to the local army. Such expenditures are designed to strengthen the hand of the recognized government to put down the challenge of revolution. Economic aid is extended to Third World countries not only to buy their support on foreign-policy issues but also to lubricate the process of "gradualism" and strengthen the forces of "stability.". In other words, U.S. policy is to support governments that promise to revolutionize their societies from above, although, as the continued support of military dictators and reactionary regimes demonstrates, this is scarcely a requirement. ...