Arguments don’t come much clearer than in this book. Casting his net over U.S. efforts to overthrow governments in Latin America from 1954 to 1989, Michael Grow asks why and rejects the two “standard scholarly explanations . . . : U.S. national-security concerns and U.S. economic interests” (p. x). Rather, playing a key role were “three entirely different factors — U.S. international credibility, U.S. domestic politics, and lobbying by Latin American and Caribbean political actors” (p. xi).
Skeptics will doubt that Grow can dismiss security and economic motives in favor of these “softer” ones. But he successfully shows that these overlooked factors may, in some cases, have been decisive. In the strongest cases, all three are obvious and convincing. In 1965, for instance, Lyndon Johnson imagined the assault on Santo Domingo by allegedly Castro-trained rebels to be part of a worldwide test of U.S. resolve. Simultaneously agonizing over the Vietnam...
