The Rise Of The New Imperialism
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Book By: Greg Grandin
Metropolitan-Henry Holt;
286 Pages; $25
Reviewed By: Noam Lupu
The San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, May 21, 2006

When Richard Nixon was told that the Marxist Salvador Allende had won Chile's Presidential election in late 1970, he screamed: "That son of a bitch, that son of a bitch," and ordered his aides to "Bring about (Allende's) downfall."

Nixon was of course neither the first nor the last United States President to order the overthrow of a Latin American government.

From the CIA's ouster of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 to the Bay of Pigs attempt to unseat Fidel Castro to Washington's support of a 2002 military coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (which lasted all of 47 hours), Chile was only one in a long sequence of U.S. impositions into the domestic affairs of our neighbors to the south.

Although Greg Grandin briefly revisists these episodes in his book: "Empires Workshop: Latin America, The United States, And The Rise Of The New Imperialism," the New York University Historian's focus is on U.S. involvement in Central America in the 1980s.

Grandin contends that in the turmoil in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, the Reagan administration laid the foundation for today's U.S. foreign policy.

Those anti-Communist efforts united the far-flung constituencies of the Republican Party--Evangelical Christians, neoconservative hawks, and corporate leaders--and reviewed public acceptance of military engagements abroad in the wake of the Vietnam debacle.

More to Grandin's point, the interventions in Central America also allowed the foreign policy establishment to test new methods, from questionably legal interrogation technicques to extensive propaganda machines--methods it would go on to implement two decades later in Iraq.

The analogy between U.S. adventures in Central America and Iraq is more apt than it initially seems. Many of the political figures involved are the same:

* John Negroponte, the current intelligence czar, was Reagan's ambassador to Honduras and a major player in the Iran-Contra dealings.

* Otto Reich was ambassador to Venezuela and founder of Reagan's Office of Public Diplomacy before becoming assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere in 2002; and

* Elliott Abrams, Bush's deputy national security adviser, was Reagan's assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs who pleaded guilty in the Iran-Contra investigations and was pardoned by President George H. W. Bush.

As for the coalescing of the New Right, Reagan's foreign policy indeed played a crucial role, although so did domestic factors such as the culture wars.

The central idea in "Empire's Workshop" is insightful and the narrative informative...