Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (Hardcover)

by Stephen Kinzer (Author)
Key Phrases: flies walking across their eyeballs, jewel leaders, godless terrorism, United States, Puerto Rico, State Department (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The recent ouster of Saddam Hussein may have turned "regime change" into a contemporary buzzword, but it's been a tactic of American foreign policy for more than 110 years. Beginning with the ouster of Hawaii's monarchy in 1893, Kinzer runs through the foreign governments the U.S. has had a hand in toppling, some of which he has written about at length before (in All the Shah's Men, etc.). Recent invasions of countries such as Grenada and Panama may be more familiar to readers than earlier interventions in Iran and Nicaragua, but Kinzer, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, brings a rich narrative immediacy to all of his stories. Although some of his assertions overreach themselves—as when he proposes that better conduct by the American government in the Spanish-American War might have prevented the rise of Castro a half-century later—he makes a persuasive case that U.S. intervention destabilizes world politics and often leaves countries worse off than they were before. Kinzer's argument isn't new, but it's delivered in unusually moderate tones, which may earn him an audience larger than the usual crew of die-hard leftists. (Apr.)
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From The Washington Post
Do you think George W. Bush and the neoconservatives inducted "regime change" into American foreign policy's hall of fame? Think again. Long before Iraq, U.S. presidents, spies, corporate types and their acolytes abroad had honed the art of deposing foreign governments.

As Stephen Kinzer tells the story in Overthrow, America's century of regime changing began not in Iraq but Hawaii. Hawaii? Indeed. Kinzer explains that Hawaii's white haole minority -- in cahoots with the U.S. Navy, the White House and Washington's local representative -- conspired to remove Queen Liliuokalani from her throne in 1893 as a step toward annexing the islands. The haole plantation owners believed that by removing the queen (who planned to expand the rights of Hawaii's native majority) and making Hawaii part of the United States, they could get in on a lucrative but protected mainland sugar market. Ever wonder why free trade has such a bad name?

Over the decades, a version of this story repeats, and repeats. Kinzer, a New York Times reporter, writes that the United States has thwarted independence movements in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Nicaragua; staged covert actions and coups d'etat in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam and Chile; and invaded Grenada, Panama and obviously Afghanistan and Iraq. Over 110 years, Kinzer argues, the United States has deployed its power to gain access to natural resources, stifle dissent and control the nationalism of newly independent states or political movements.

Kinzer's narrative abounds with unusual anecdotes, vivid description and fine detail, demonstrating why he ranks among the best in popular foreign policy storytelling, especially for those on the left. His 1982 book Bitter Fruit (which he co-authored with Stephen Schlesinger) described the 1954 CIA covert action campaign that overthrew Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. The book became a classic on college campuses in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration used attempts to "roll back" Soviet-backed communism as the rationale for funding the Nicaraguan contras and a massive counterinsurgency campaign against leftist rebels in El Salvador. For many Americans who cut their political teeth not on Vietnam but on the Central American wars (as well as for the Latin Americans who witnessed these displays of imperial hubris more directly), such interventions raised profound doubts that American meddling -- whether packaged as rollback, preemption or democracy promotion -- could possibly be worth the human or political cost.

Kinzer fills in the blanks left by those historians and policymakers for whom America's rise is mainly about the macho stuff of maneuvering around the other big guys on the block, be they France, Spain, Germany, Great Britain, the Soviet Union or China. Overthrow cautions against such parochial thinking and warns that the consequences of playing fast and loose with American power are almost always bad -- for the stability or the democratic aspirations of the target countries, for the well-being of their citizens and, because of the often vicious anti-American backlashes, for the welfare of the United States itself. Even so, Kinzer asks at each juncture whether a different cast of characters -- in the White House, at the CIA or on the ground -- would have acted more cautiously. He concludes that although the particular instincts or politics of this or that American president often helped shape U.S. behavior abroad, a reckless imperial impulse is simply part of America's DNA.

Provocative as all this history is, Overthrow stumbles when its tone shifts from lively storytelling to World Book Encyclopedia entry. It also sometimes slips into deliciously tempting caricature: John Foster Dulles, the evangelical Christian, Wall Street power broker, sits cozily in his wood-paneled library, using his finger to stir his evening Scotch and contemplate where next to fling American power; Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega is venal and sadistic one minute, a crybaby the next.

Although Kinzer's objective is to highlight the downside of covert and overt overthrows, he provides a better sense of what made the Americans tick than of what motivated those they tried to push around. Surely these foreign leaders, whom Kinzer depicts as U.S. victims and pawns, had their own strategies for dealing with American power, understanding (just as America's great-power rivals or Cold War allies did) that the United States could be -- had to be -- manipulated to their own ends. With some notable exceptions, Overthrow does not tell us enough about the domestic environments that shaped the perspectives of those leaders whom the United States was busy overthrowing, isolating or provoking.

Too tall an order? Perhaps. But it goes to what fans of gunboat diplomacy will see as a fundamental weakness of Kinzer's book: the assumption that regime change is necessarily harmful for the United States and the target country. After all, they will argue, Panama now controls its own canal and has a democratically elected, center-left government. Chile's democracy and economic probity are a model for Latin America. Afghanistan (and even Iraq) could defy the odds and emerge as stable and somewhat democratic. To be sure, eliminating the Taliban was hardly an objectionable use of U.S. power. But even in Afghanistan, the United States laid the groundwork for the Taliban's return by so quickly shifting troops and resources to Iraq, demonstrating the difficulty that the United States has in coping with the consequences of even a successful and morally correct intervention.

Unfortunately, the very audience that should read this book -- those who theologically defer to the shifting diktats of the national interest and still endorse deploying U.S. military power to remake countries -- is the least likely to bother picking it up. Twenty years ago, Bitter Fruit motivated a generation to think seriously about the impact of U.S. interventions in the southern hemisphere. I have a sad suspicion that, with Iraq's seemingly endless toll, Overthrow will likewise become required reading.

Reviewed by Julia E. Sweig
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Times Books (April 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805078614
• ISBN-13: 978-0805078619
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (117 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #69,723 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

108 of 121 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Some Unpleasant, Mostly Unknown US History! , April 6, 2006

By	S. Henkels (Devon, Pa United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

It's surely true that about all Major World Powers, at least European and American, have invaded and occupied many smaller nations for economic and corporate reasons. Mr. Kinzer makes the point that most, if not all, of the USA invasions from Hawaii in 1893 to Iraq in 2003, have been the result of US corporations (oil,sugar,bananas,etc) persuading the USA Powers that local, nationalistic pressures on the bottom line should result in "Regime Change" military Operations, for the past 113 years, from Ben Harrison to GW Bush. And usually the result is negative, though sometimes these results may take a very long time to show. Case in point: Iran, where in 1954 a US-sponsored "Regime Change" due largely to corporate pressures resulted in some very unfriendly feelings in Iran towards the USA, lasting through the 1979-80 Revolution, and into today's Diplomatic Stalement. The Central American Operations are well known, along with Cuba and the Philipines during the Spanish American War of 1898, another war stated on some bogus info:ie, the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor. Though US Politicians may be convinced of their own righteousness in ordering "Regime Change", the local people are not always convinced, and can even hold very long term grudges.He is not positive on the current Iraq Mess, noting the obvious, though he does admit it's possible that the future may be better!

44 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tying the Threads Together, April 9, 2006

By	Bart King (Portland, Oregon) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

OVERTHROW is a remarkably interesting book. It ties together 14 different instances of U.S. "intervention" (read: regime change) by finding similarities between U.S. foreign policy in places as geographically and culturally various as Chile and Iran.

Among Kinzer's conclusions is that it is impossible for the U.S. to EVER be successful in the long term when we get caught in the temptations of implementing regime changes. This is partially due to the fact that one can't install leaders in foreign countries who are both genuinely popular with their compatriots AND who are looking out for American interests. The two are nearly always mutually exclusive.

But it's one thing to sum up one of Kinzer's primary theses, and quite another to read OVERTHROW's specific and fascinating examples. I consider myself well read and informed, yet in each chapter, I found historical material that surprised me. Stephen Kinzer's work as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times served him well for this volume: He is a master at "explaining" the interesting stories and crucial background needed to understand his case studies in this book. Brilliant work.

47 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Some History We All Need To Know..., May 6, 2006

By	Dr. Jonathan Dolhenty (Port Orford, OR United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Stephen Kinzer's latest book, "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq," is, I think, a necessary and valuable contribution to the study of American history. It's one of those few books that I begin reading and find difficult to put aside. While not exactly a "thriller" in the ordinary sense of a James Bond novel, I found myself continuing to turn page after page, reluctant to take a break, hesitant to stop reading lest I miss something important by forgetting where I left off and, all in all, curious about what was coming next. This was strange; after all, I taught American history for over ten years and have continued to study it ever since I left teaching. But not much of the "stuff" Kinzer is relating. No, the whole idea of so-called "regime change" was never a topic discussed in a history class I taught. For that matter, it was not a topic in any American history course I took in college.

Now, this does not mean that those of my generation were ignorant of the things of which Kinzer writes. I grew up and lived in the era when many of the "regime changes" discussed by the author were taking place. Neither I nor my contemporaries, however, used the term "regime change" or looked at those incidents through the conceptual lens that many of us do today. As close as I remember getting to this sort of political reality was when I spent ten days in Hawaii way back in the 1960s and was introduced to a few native Hawaiians who did not have very good things to say about the American missionaries and businessmen who stepped afoot on their island and simply took control, changing (or "destroying"?) a culture that had been around for hundreds of years and successfully so. A "regime change"? Well, I don't think any of us looked at it quite that way back then.

This book definitely reminds us of some uncomfortable incidents in American history. The United States, as Kinzer points out, has overthrown at least fourteen sovereign foreign governments. Furthermore, the United States seems to have adopted a policy of interfering in foreign governments long ago, possibly as long as a hundred years or so. So our recent invasion of Iraq, for instance, in the name of "regime change," should come as no surprise to the informed. Actually, many of the "intrusions" the United States has made into other countries -- whether by supporting friendly coups, by fomenting internal revolutions, or by just plain military invasions -- have occurred during my lifetime. These include Cuba, Iran, Viet Nam, Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama, and most recently, Iraq. I might relate that I was in Central America during the time of the hostilities in Nicaragua and Guatemala and did experience firsthand some of the problems there.

There is no doubt in my mind that the United States has aggressively interfered in the internal affairs of other nations. That is a matter of record. And I submit that it is difficult to justify most of this interference since it was either promoted by or in the personal interests of American alien-residents or large corporations who simply wanted to exploit the local populace and their natural resources. Kinzer provides many examples of both cases and he does it objectively and dispassionately. Historical facts are historical facts. The United States does have many things to be ashamed of regarding its foreign policies and practices.

Let's be fair, however, and look at the excursions which are narrated by Kinzer with some historical perspective. While it is true that the United States government has involved itself in many questionable and possibly condemnable practices in foreign affairs, it has certainly not been alone. It has had no monopoly on international intrigue and exploitation. England, France, China, Holland, Spain, Japan, Germany, Turkey, Russia -- need I go on? -- are also guilty of building empires of their own, invading foreign nations, exploiting human beings, and involving themselves in, to say the least, despicable practices.

This is not an excuse for the behavior of the United States regarding its past or present international "sins," but it is necessary to place these matters in some perspective. If the United States is to be considered the "Great Satan" out there, it has lots and lots of company. Many other countries need to realize that they may be part of the "international problem" too. That being said, the United States has to do much better on the international stage. America needs to be an exemplar of democratic reform and human rights and it can't do that by trying to impose such through the force of arms. As I have said elsewhere: The United States may currently be the "big man" on the international campus, but it ought not be the "big bully" in the international school yard.

I think that Kinzer ends his book with an observation that all of us need to take to heart. He says: "The United States rose to world power more quickly than almost any nation or empire ever has. Filled with the exuberance and self-confidence of youth, it developed a sense of unlimited possibility. Many Americans came to believe that since they had been so successful in building their country, they not only duplicate that success abroad but were called by Providence to do so. Responding to this call, and to their belief that they are entitled to a large share of the world's resources, they set out to overthrow foreign governments. Most of these adventures have brought them, and the nations whose histories they sought to change, far more pain than liberation." I'll second that.

Lest readers think that Kinzer in his book or I in my review are being "unpatriotic" at this critical time, let me remind them that "patriotism" means "love of one's country," not "love of one's current government." This book is a must read for all true "patriots."