Empire's Workshop
Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A groundbreaking examination of Latin America's pivotal role in shaping U.S. imperial ambitions and tactics.
In the quest to understand the Bush administration's aggressive foreign policy, countless books have scoured Roman and British imperial history for precedents. Yet they have largely overlooked the most influential laboratory for America's extraterritorial rule: Latin America.
In Empire's Workshop, historian Greg Grandin uncovers this long-obscured history, tracing U.S. imperial operations from Thomas Jefferson's dreams of an "empire of liberty" in Cuba and Spanish Florida to Ronald Reagan's support for brutal, U.S.-friendly regimes in Central America. He reveals how Latin America served as the genesis for the Bush administration's policies, where key figures like John Negroponte, Elliott Abrams, and Otto Reich first embraced military power to advance free-market economics and enlisted evangelical support for their ventures.
As much of Latin America now rebels against U.S. domination, Grandin poses a vital question: If Washington has failed to bring prosperity and democracy to its own backyard "workshop," what chance does it have of doing so for the world?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
America's post-9/11 policy of idealistic military adventurism has a long history, argues this incisive study. NYU historian Grandin (The Blood of Guatemala) sketches the vexed course of U.S. relations with Latin America, but focuses on the Reagan administration's involvement in Central America during the 1980s, when it backed the Salvadoran government in a brutal civil war against left-wing insurgents and the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinista regime. Then as now, Grandin contends, Washington justified a militarist stance by citing a threat to America (Communists advancing on the Rio Grande) and championing democracy and human rights. America did not send troops but did sponsor native death squads in El Salvador, and the author notes recent press reports that the U.S. military is sponsoring similar death squads in Iraq. Grandin's conception of American imperialism covering everything from outright invasion to corporate investment and Fed interest-rate hikes is too broad, and he overstates the importance of Central America in the making of the American New Right. But this timely book offers an analysis of the ideological foundations of today's foreign policy consensus and a cautionary tale about its dark legacy.
