Kinzer writes well and knows how get the reader to keep turning the pages. He is at his best when he is putting together individual stories of little known characters who played decisive roles in the history of US interventions. The book is worth it for these stories and for the characters that Kinzer unearths. But Kinzer tries to play two other roles for which he, as a former reporter, simply does not have the skills. What happens when news turns into patterns? Answer: then it is no longer news. When what seems like a new event becomes part of a pattern, then we have ventured into social theory. As much as I envy their writing, their story telling, and their eye for individuals, I also feel bad for former reporters. Most of them are trained to recognize events and dont know what to do when faced with patterns. As a hopeful social theorist, Kinzer wants to line up all the US interventions and show us a pattern. Each of his three sections (Imperial Era, Covert Action, and Invasions) ends with a chapter where he tries his hand at social theory. He moves, that is, from events to patterns. Mostly he fails for reasons I will discuss shortly.Kinzers third mode is as an adjudicator. He decides, as white bearded God sitting up high with lightening bolts, which interventions were worth it (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Grenada, Panama, and Afghanistan) and which werent (Philippines, Cuba, Honduras, Guetamala, Iran, Vietnam, and Chile). (I remained unclear about his position on Iraq.) The problem is that he leaves these decisions untheorized. And frankly this leaves him looking rather simple minded to those of us who have dedicated some energy to just such theorizing. Of course, he is, as they say, entitled to his opinion. But interventions in Third world countries are perhaps more than a matter of which flavor of ice-cream one likes, which films are good, or which style of music one prefers. The likely sad truth is that you and I have probably spent more energy theorizing ice-cream, films, and musical styles than Kinzer has spent on his adjudicating US interventions. Kinzers major flaw, I think, is that he cannot help needing to deliver some good news to his readers. Whereas those, such as Chomsky, Zinn, and Churchill, make a commitment to cataloging US interventions and displaying their damage, Kinzer, like Joshua Moravchik and Max Boot, wants to support some of these interventions. I am not sure whether he does this out of conviction or as a strategy to keep from losing what he imagines is his typical US reader. In the conclusion, though, the defense of US intervention drops out. Here Kinzer makes the realist point (quoting Thucydides) that power corrupts even, and perhaps especially, those who believe naively in their own exceptionalism. This is an important point. But the point is made at some cost.The cost is an overemphasis on individuals, actions, and events over patterns, systems, and structures; a porous and vapid defense of the occasional super-power intervention; and a framework that treats its readers as children who need morals to their stories. The stories are great. If they can be excised from Kinzers shallowness and placed within a richer frame, then this book can be useful. Otherwise I'd rather have the bald faced frontal defenders of empire (Murivchik, Boot) or those who do not to hesitate to point to empires indefensibility (Chomsky, Churchill).

If I had to summarize my thoughts about this book into a single sentence, I would only need to say that Stephen Kinzers Overthrow should be required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in the relationship of the U.S. to the rest of the world. In it, Kinzer looks at over a dozen examples of U.S. intervention in foreign countries since the turn of the 20th century and presents them together to illustrate a sordid, damaging, and largely unbroken history of what is now blandly called regime change.This one took me substantially longer to read than I expected, simply because the outrage I felt at reading about each cynical intervention made it impossible for me to read more than one chapter at a time. Again and again, the U.S. has contrived to overthrow democratically elected leaders (many who had already demonstrated progress in improving conditions for the citizens of their own countries) and installed autocratic, sometimes pliant, usually violent, dictatorial regimes abroad, all the while presenting to the American people the image of itself as a benevolent force for peace and democracy around the world. Anyone who already looks at American policy with a critical eye will not necessarily be shocked by what Kinzer recounts here, but laying them out together draws out a continuity of purpose that runs through all of the interventions. The chapters are grouped into three coherent and useful sections, beginning with what Kinzer labels the an American imperial phase, documenting the first stumbling steps of the nations leadership into a forceful, expansionist policy beyond U.S. territorial limits (in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Honduras). The second part of the book deals with post-WWII uses of covert action (in Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, and Chile) to depose foreign governments deemed unfriendly the U.S., usually under the banner of anti-communism. The third and final section sees a post-Cold War return to overt military invasion (in Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq), though unlike the operations of the early 20th century, these can no longer acceptably be treated as justified exercises of imperial power, and are now superficially couched in nicer rationales. Individual chapters focus on a single country or a region of connected smaller conflicts, and then each section is capped by an epilogue-type summary chapter, reviewing what has happened in the countries of focus in the years since, and synthesizing a broader critique of the intervention policy.The book makes a powerful argument about the nature of U.S. foreign intervention, though my primary complaint about it is that at times, Kinzer seems to miss his own point. For example, the chapters in Part Two demonstrate persuasively that pure individual/corporate financial interest was responsible for U.S. coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, yet in his summary chapter for this section, Kinzer gives unwarranted credence to the notion that the U.S. had merely misjudged nationalist actions in those countries as expressions of global communism. While the individual chapters make clear the decisive role that capital interests played in putting coups into motion, Kinzer argues that, Americans overthrew governments only when economic interest coincided with ideological ones. (p. 215) The circumstances he presents in previous chapters, however, more convincingly support the conclusion that the ideological argument was conveniently dragooned into service whenever the capitalist crisis was urgent enough. Honestly, its hard to imagine it could be otherwise in a country where the titans of business have historically played such a direct role in national government. Take, for example, this passage from Part One of the book, where Kinzer diagrams the deep intermingling of the United Fruit Company and the U.S. government (p. 129-130):Few private companies have ever been as closely interwoven with the United States government as United Fruit was during the mid-1950s. [Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles had, for decades, been one of its principal legal counselors. His brother, Allen, the CIA director, had also done legal work for the company and owned a substantial block of its stock. John Moors Cabot, the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, was a large shareholder. So was his brother, Thomas Dudley Cabot, the director of international security affairs in the State Department, who had been United Fruit's president. General Robert Cutler, head of the National Security Council, was its former chairman of the board. John J. McCloy, the president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, was a former board member. Both undersecretary of state Walter Bedell Smith and Robert Hill, the American ambassador to Costa Rica, would join the board after leaving government service.This is not merely the typical case of close personal ties between wealthy, patrician businessmen and wealthy, patrician politicians. This is state power wielded by men with a direct, overt financial interest in the outcome. At minimum, Kinzers argument that capital interests would be insufficient justification for intervention without coincident ideological passion on the part of U.S. officials would be substantially more credible if he offered any counter examples of incidents where capital had not gotten its way. The bigger problem is that Kinzers position gives too much credit to U.S. leadership. In Kinzers view, the U.S. governments use of anti-communism as justification for intervention, was the easy way out, an extreme form of intellectual laziness. (p. 215) The truth is more simple and less benign than that. What the ultra-rich (and ultra-politically-powerful) are most concerned about is losing their capital. When their capital interests have been under threat in foreign countries contemplating nationalization of private companies, or facing competition from new national companies, the U.S. has reliably come to their aid -- whether under cover of the fight against communism or the war on terror. The ideological rationale is incidental.I picked up Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism at the same time as I bought Overthrow, and while I have yet to read Shock Doctrine, they seem like a natural pairing even more now then they did then. (For one thing, I imagine Ill find more of the type of argument Im talking about in Kleins book than in Overthrow). But even though I disagree with Kinzers conclusions to some extent, my criticisms are minimal. It is an outstanding book, engagingly paced, accessibly written, and well documented. Bottom line: essential reading.

This gripping narrative should underscore a deeper historical current, and I bet the author was a tad too anti-ideological to pick it up. And that's the major failing of this astonishing book. The story of Hawaii, for example, seems bizarre in a way because such B-grade characters carried it out against an obviously powerful Queen. How did that really happen? Benjamin Harrison's mighty approval?And where did Noriega REALLY come from? Not to mention Edward Landsdale, who was Magsaysay's kingmaker before he fucked up Vietnam? As I kept reading, I felt that America was an octupus that needed serious harpooning and dissecting. This rarely gets done here, and you get the impression that the "great men" of American history really are essential to its fucked-up history. Corporate lawyer John Foster Dulles, for example, gazed into his fireplace while buggering Iran. Or Leonard Wood, what a stern imperialist dickweed. Or even Dick Cheney (his involvement in the Operation Just Cause was just, y'know, weird). Still, if the words "Sam Zemurray" and "Mossadegh" and "Luis Munoz Rivera" mean nothing to you, you must read this book. Core knowledge.

Kinzers Overthrow is a history of the USA taking over countries by overthrowing their governments over the past 125 years. It all began in January 1893 when president Mackinleys administration supported schemes by planters to take over Hawaii by dethroning the queen. This first overthrow included most of the elements that would characterize later ones: an economic interest by powerful business cartels (in this case, sugar), religious justification (redeeming benighted natives) and geopolitical considerations (a stepping stone to a Pacific empire). Thus did the US break with its former policy of keeping to its own shores and keeping foreign powers away from them. Yet, with the exception of Hawaii, which eventually became a US state (the last so far) and thus achieved order and prosperity (at the expense of its native culture and autonomy), these interventions usually ended up by wrecking the existing order and ushering in decades of instability and mayhem, usually suffered by the local population but often with regional or even global ramifications. In all cases the US was willing to incur significant costs to depose a government for not giving free rein to a powerful corporation or group of corporations, but not so much in investing in building up the country from the wreckage left after the troops left. Central America has been made toxic to this day due to over a century of US dominance. The same may be said by the Philippines, Iran and Afghanistan. Possible exceptions may be Chile and Grenada, although these were stable and orderly places before the overthrow of their leftist regimes and may therefore be seen to have reverted to type. The same may be said of Vietnam, but in that solitary case the locals won. The poster child for non intervention (particularly of the short-sighted, dumb kind) is Iraq, where hundreds of thousands have died and millions have been displaced, overwhelming Europe as refugees and justifying xenophobic parties and isolationist policies. Yet the brutality of Abu Ghraib was preceded by the brutality of the Philippino campaign and the My Lai massacre. The overthrow of nationalistic, progressive presidency of José Santos Zelaya gave rise, decades later, to virulently anti-US Sandinistas. Anticommunist Mossadeghs overthrow eventually gave rise to ayatollah Homeini and Afghan Najibullahs communist regime that never attacked the US ended in the reign of the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. Not a stellar record, even if one omits that the Nicaraguans has to live through 40 years of Somoza dictatorship, the Iranians through 25 years of the Shahs tyranny and the Afghans through 20 years of civil war. The history of US interventions abroad is almost a school text on unintended consequences, on the limits of optimism and of the fragility or order, even of deficient order. Overall, an excellent book.

Got the book to read the section on Hawai'i. Should have stopped there as I had originally planned. Found the book rather one sided & biased at times. I am sure we have many skeletons in the closet & much to be ashamed for but in light of 9/11, al-Qaeda and now ISIS, the United States is fighting their own terror and daily overthrow plots. Found parts of it very interesting & other parts dull. As others have said some of the claims in this book are very shocking & sensational. Wondering how well the actual facts check out?