“Pentagonism,” as Juan Bosch describes it, is a gigantic conspiracy of big business and the military establishment replacing imperialism as a means of economic exploitation. It differs from imperialism because the first victims are the people of the United States, which the pentagonists have converted into a colony. Since the conspirators’ purpose is to fatten off the profits from armament contracts, their success depends on keeping the United States engaged in foreign wars. Bosch sees pentagonism as something that has developed only in very recent years, and he identifies the intervention of 1965 in the Dominican Republic as their first enterprise. He thinks that the general popular support for this intervention and later for the war in Vietnam shows that the American people themselves— business, organized labor, the universities, and even former liberals— have been pentagonized into blind submission. He paints an alarming picture of this exploitation, its effects on American society and politics, and its disastrous implications for other countries.
Though many of us have been concerned about the great military-industrial complex which has developed with the growth of our defense expenditure, most North Americans would probably feel that this picture is overdrawn. Few well-informed people, even if they disapproved of the intervention in Santo Domingo, can think that the American government intervened simply because it wanted a foreign war. It seems an exaggeration to say, as the author does, that “the United States was to end up being a nation with two governments—a civil government for inside the country, and a military government for outside the country” (p. 51). In Latin America, on the other hand, Bosch’s distinguished position and his confident language about conditions in the United States will make his often inaccurate assertions more convincing. At a time when cooperation and mutual understanding between the United States and Latin America are so necessary for the welfare of both, it is unfortunate that so eminent a person should publish a book which can only cause misunderstanding.