Greg Grandin
Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism
Metropolitan Books, 2006
286 pages $25
($16 paperback, May 2007)
Review by PETER LAMPHERE
ASSISTANT SECRETARY of State Otto Reich. UN Ambassador John Negroponte. Deputy National Security Advisor Elliot Abrams. The list goes on and on of key players and architects of the war on terror who got their start in foreign policy circles orchestrating Reagan-era interventions in Central America.
Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop argues that this is not an accident—that Latin America has played the role of a laboratory and proving ground for U.S. imperialism, where interventions have been tested and later applied to the rest of the world. He shows how the Central American interventions of the 1980s in many ways prefigured the Bush administration’s imperial adventures twenty years later in the Middle East.
Grandin uncovers uncanny parallels between these two moments of aggressive U.S. foreign policy, going beyond the obvious though eye-opening connections, like the key role played by people such as Negroponte (who was ambassador to Honduras where he helped orchestrate the contra war against the Sandinista government). For example, Grandin shows the origins of mercenary firms like DynCorp and Blackwater in militarized pro-Contra groups in the United States, and how the use of the same propaganda techniques, like controlling reporters on the ground, developed by Otto Reich in the 1980s in the Office of Public Diplomacy, were recycled by Rumsfeld’s Pentagon to sell the war in Iraq.
But the argument is not just that there is a continuity of personnel or techniques from the Reagan-era State Department to that of the Bush years.
Rather, Grandin makes the case that the Central American interventions were the product of a confluence of three key right-wing movements that again have reunited in the crusade against Iraq and Afghanistan. Neoconservatives driven by anticommunism like Reagan UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, economic neoliberals like Chicago economist Milton Friedman, and Christian Evangelicals like Pat Robertson, all found common cause in an aggressive foreign policy toward Latin America.
All these forces, disappointed by the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, coalesced around a program of pushing back the radical nationalism represented by Salvador Allende in Chile, Sandinismo in Nicaragua, and the left-wing guerrillas in El Salvador and Guatemala. First the bloody Chilean regime of August Pinochet became a proving ground, especially for neoliberal economic policy, and then Central America. These were places where intervention would not be effectively challenged by the Soviet Union and where poorly-armed peasant and left movements could be attacked by U.S.-backed paramilitaries and death squads.
Beyond just an analysis of the specific post-Vietnam foreign policy moment, Grandin’s book is also an excellent overview of American policy toward Latin America during the entire century. However, at times, he is too soft on New Deal capitalism’s approach to the continent, lionizing FDR’s “precocious call” for a non-intervention policy. To his credit, however, Grandin goes far to dispel illusions in the good will of other Democratic presidents toward the southern hemisphere, exposing John Kennedy’s sponsorship of the predecessor organizations of the Salvadoran death squads. He also highlights Clinton’s turn toward a foreign policy focused on “free market absolutism and American militarism, [which] served as a bridge between Reagan’s resurgent nationalism and George W. Bush’s revolutionary imperialism.”
Grandin’s book should be read by everyone who is interested in getting a sense of the broad arc of U.S. imperialism in the twentieth century, especially with regards to Latin America, as well as those who want to understand some of the key domestic political roots of the current imperial resurgence.
