Although historians have welcomed Lewis Hanke’s Borzoi series of anthologies on Latin America, a good many of the books emphasize recent events too much to be of maximum usefulness in a history course. This is true of C. Neale Ronning’s collection of writings on intervention. The problem dates back at least to the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine and came to a climax during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, about half of the readings apply to the period since 1945, and the unhappy Dominican intervention of 1965 bulks larger than any other subject considered. Doubtless it is natural for the Latin Americans to inquire: “But what have you done to me recently?” Still, one may hope that the Dominican adventure was an atavism, not to be soon repeated. As it recedes toward the horizon, the emphasis placed on it here may quickly “date” the book.

That objection aside, Ronning has done an excellent, sensitive job in presenting the complexities of the intervention problem. Put simply, the dilemma is this: How can the governments of the hemisphere reconcile the theoretical equality of sovereign nations with the practical power—political, economic, charismatic—of the United States? No one has found a completely acceptable answer, perhaps not even a plausible one; but minds such as those of Francisco García Calderón, Manuel Ugarte, Luis Quintanilla, John F. Kennedy, J. William Fulbright, Luis M. Drago, and Alberto Lleras Camargo have attacked the problem; and Ronning presents us with some of their ratiocinations.

It would have been easy to fill the collection with fire-breathing, but even in representing Ugarte, Quintanilla, and Juan Bosch, Ronning has chosen relatively mild, well-reasoned excerpts, intended to convince the yanqui, not flay him alive. Americans (North Americans, that is) are underrepresented, but when they appear in the persons of such as Kennedy, Fulbright, and J. Fred Rippy, they have something to say. Rippy in particular brings postwar noninterventionism down to earth by showing its fundamental inconsistency with the widespread use of foreign aid.

The emphasis on recent developments and on Latin American opinions leaves an important gap—the reactions of the interventors during and after the period of their policy’s greatest extension. A half dozen excerpts from Leonard Wood, Woodrow Wilson, Enoch Crowder, Henry J. Stimson, or possibly some marine engaged in occupying Haiti or Nicaragua might further highlight the exasperating contradictions and entanglements which appear whenever strength and weakness meet.