He begins in 1893, when the American minister to Hawaii organized to overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy in order to protect the interests of sugar plantation owners. In 1898, U.S. imperialism made its real debut with the Spanish American War, in which it seized Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The war's planners hid their real intentions behind a veil of lies, fabricated provocations, and racist ideology:

Spreading democracy, Christianizing heathen nations, building a strong navy, establishing military bases around the world, and bringing foreign governments under American control were never ends in themselves. They were ways for the United States to assure itself access to the markets, resources, and investment potential of distant lands.

The conquest of the Philippines was carried out with staggering brutality. A 1901 story in the Philadelphia Ledger reported, “Our men…have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog, noisome reptile in some instances, whose best disposition was the rubbish heap.”

The attack on the Filipino village of Balangiga, carried out by Colonel Jacob Smith, was the Haditha or Mai-Lai massacre of its day:

Smith arrived, took charge of the remaining garrisons, and ordered his men to kill everyone over the age of ten and turn the island's interior into a “howling wilderness. I want no prisoners,” he told them. “I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and the more you burn, the better you will please me.”

It gave his regime billions of dollars in military aid, much of which he spent on violent campaigns against both rebel insurgencies and peaceful opposition movements. The reason was clear. Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval station had become foundations of American military power in Asia, and the U.S. was willing to do whatever was necessary to hold on to them.

Over the following decades, the U.S. backed a series of brutal military dictatorships in Honduras that put down all protests, strikes, and popular movements. And in the 1980s, Honduras became a base from which the CIA trained and organized death squads to deploy in the U.S. war on Nicaragua.

By then, the U.S. was in its second-Cold War-phase of regime change. Open military intervention threatened to pull the U.S. into a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union, so the typical method of overthrow in this phase was to use covert CIA action. In Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile, the CIA organized to put in place brutal client regimes that tortured, murdered, and pillaged their own populations. Only in Vietnam was the national liberation struggle able to ultimately defeat the U.S., at a terrible cost to the people of Southeast Asia.

In 1951, the CIA, in partnership with United Fruit, which owned much of Central America, overthrew the democratically elected and popular government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Arbenz said at the time:

Our crime is having enacted an agrarian reform which affected the interests of the United Fruit Company.… Our crime is our patriotic wish to advance, to progress, to win an economic independence that would match our political independence.

death squads roamed with impunity, chasing down and murdering politicians, union organizers, student activists, and peasant leaders. Thousands were kidnapped…and never seen again. Many were tortured to death on military bases.

Between 1960 and 1990, the United States provided Guatemala with hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid. Americans trained and armed the Guatemalan army and police, sent Green Beret teams to accompany soldiers on antiguerrilla missions, and dispatched planes from the Panama Canal Zone to drop napalm on suspected guerrilla hideouts.

The third phase of U.S. imperialism started with the decline of the Soviet Union in the 1980s and gradual reversal of the “Vietnam Syndrome”-a label for the unwillingness of Americans to support direct overseas intervention after the retreat from Vietnam. New interventions in this period include the invasions of Grenada and Panama, CIA support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, which led to the rise of al-Qaeda, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, and 2003 invasion of Iraq. Readers may be more familiar with this recent period, but Kinzer's account is worth reading because it shows how these events fit in with the longer patterns of imperialism.

The book has some weaknesses. For example, it doesn't discuss U.S. intervention in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, East Timor, and some others, except for a brief disclaimer at the beginning of the book. And Kinzer's focus is almost exclusively on individuals at the top of society who “made” this history. Ordinary people in the countries attacked by the U.S., or in the U.S. itself, don't really appear, except as helpless victims or consenting subjects.

Finally, the book ends with an oddly pat appeal for a “thoughtful foreign policy” that uses “combinations of incentives, threats, punishment and rewards,” to deal with “dangerous” regimes. He writes, “Deft combinations of measures to build civil society, strengthen free enterprise, promote trade, and encourage diplomatic solutions to international problems have worked wonders in many countries.”

It is a strange way to conclude, since the weight of the preceding history tells us otherwise. At stake in each invasion is the ability of U.S. capital to go anywhere and do anything, and to prevent any upstart nation from setting an example of resistance to U.S. power. But don't be put off by this shortcoming. Overthrow has a wealth of insights for those who fight U.S. imperialism from within the belly of the beast.