“America goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standards of freedom.
The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.”
~John Quincy Adams, 1821
In Part 1, I talked about how we’ve learned to flatten complexity into symbols we can hate at just a glance. What follows is the record of what a nation does when it governs by the same logic.
Let’s start with 1954, Guatemala.
The United States justified its intervention in Guatemala by claiming it was stopping communism from taking root in the Western Hemisphere. The Cold War was tightening. The Soviet Union was expanding its influence. We said we could not allow another foothold in the Americas.
What Guatemala actually had was a democratically elected president, Árbenz, who proposed land reforms in a country where most farmland was owned by a tiny elite. One of the largest landholders was an American corporation, United Fruit. The reforms threatened corporate assets, and those assets were reframed as national security concerns.
The CIA organized a coup. Árbenz fled. A military government took power.
The United States said it had restored stability. What followed was forty years of civil war and mass killing, largely of Indigenous civilians. The country never recovered its democratic footing. The intervention achieved its short-term goal, but it destroyed the long-term one.
1973, Chile.
The U.S. justification for intervening in Chile was ideological containment. Salvador Allende was a socialist. He had been elected, but in our view, elections were not the issue. Alignment with the US was.
The Nixon administration feared that a successful socialist democracy would inspire others in the region. That fear mattered more than Chile’s constitutional process. The U.S. applied economic pressure, supported internal destabilization, and made clear it would welcome military intervention.
When the coup came, it was framed as an internal correction. The United States did not pull the trigger, but it approved the result.
Pinochet’s dictatorship brought order. It also brought torture, disappearances, and fear. Chile eventually returned to democracy, but only after a generation paid the cost. The U.S. got a compliant ally. Chile lost tens of thousands of lives to state violence.
1980s, Nicaragua.
The U.S. justification in Nicaragua was straightforward: stop communism by any means necessary.
The Sandinistas had overthrown a brutal dictator who had been backed by the United States. They promised reform, literacy, and land redistribution. We saw only alignment with Cuba and the Soviet bloc, which was intolerable.
The U.S. funded and armed the Contras, a guerrilla force that attacked civilians, infrastructure, and local leaders. Congress tried to stop the funding. The administration continued anyway, secretly, illegally.
The justification never changed. The threat was existential. The methods were regrettable but necessary.
The result was a devastated country, tens of thousands dead, and a generation traumatized by war. The U.S. preserved ideological dominance. Nicaragua inherited instability that persists decades later.
1989, Panama.
In 1989, the United States invaded Panama to remove Manuel Noriega, a corrupt dictator and indicted drug trafficker, and in the narrowest sense the mission succeeded. Noriega was captured and tried in U.S. courts. But the cost was borne elsewhere.
Several hundred Panamanian civilians were killed, entire neighborhoods were destroyed, and thousands were displaced, while drug trafficking routes quickly adapted, rerouted and continued. The deeper question is whether this made the US safer. It did not. Panama posed no strategic threat to American security, the drug trade was unaffected in any durable way, and the invasion lowered the threshold for using military force by recasting war as law enforcement.
A criminal was removed, but at the price of civilian lives and a precedent that made intervention easier to justify the next time. That trade did not enhance American safety; it eroded the norms meant to preserve it.
Now let’s talk about Venezuela from 2002 up until our recent intervention.
The U.S. justification for its actions in Venezuela has been consistent: promote democracy, punish corruption, relieve suffering.
In 2002, elements within Venezuela attempted to overthrow Hugo Chávez. The United States did not organize the coup, but it recognized the interim government immediately. When Chávez returned to power, Washington shifted tactics.
Sanctions followed. Diplomatic isolation followed. Alternative leadership was recognized. Each step was justified as necessary pressure on an authoritarian regime.
The stated goal was democratic transition. The effect was economic collapse, increased repression, and a population caught between an abusive state and a punishing external force.
The U.S. said it was standing with the Venezuelan people but the Venezuelan people bore the consequences.
If Panama showed how easily force could be justified procedurally, Venezuela shows how long pressure can be sustained bureaucratically, with suffering dispersed slowly enough to be ignored.
So here’s the pattern.
In each case, the American justification was internally consistent. It could be written down, explained, defended. Communism had to be stopped. Order had to be restored. Drugs had to be controlled. Democracy had to be promoted. The law had to be enforced.
In each case, the intervention succeeded in addressing the problem it named and failed to reckon with the problems it produced. Immediate control was achieved at the expense of lasting legitimacy. Authority was asserted where consent was absent.
Venezuela is not an exception to this history but just another example in a long chain of interventions that did nothing but inspire resentment.
Over time, our behavior taught Latin America a particular way of reading us. Not as friends, exactly, and not always as enemies, but as something more tiring and harder to trust. Like a relative who shows up during crises with strong opinions, rearranges the furniture, explains why it had to be done, and then leaves before living with the consequences.
Governments learned to nod politely while keeping one eye on the door. Ordinary people learned that American concern often arrived wrapped in the language of help but carried a hidden invoice payable in instability, suspicion, or violence. The result was not just resentment, though there was plenty of that, but a kind of learned guardedness: a sense that aligning too closely with Washington could be politically fatal, that reform movements might be dismissed as puppets, that democracy itself could be discredited simply by association.
In this way, even well-intentioned American involvement began to function like static in the signal, distorting trust before a word was spoken. And so each new intervention now lands on a region already braced for disappointment, already fluent in the language of domination, already aware that whatever is promised in the name of order, they will be the ones left to sweep up afterward.
And now I want to address the MAGA right in a way that is highly unusual for a center left liberal:
I can already hear your response, and I want to say this carefully: I recognize the exhaustion. I recognize the feeling of being hectored by a cultural referee who seems more interested in tone and symbolic purity than actual outcome, and in reminding us, hourly, that America is uniquely awful and racist, when a brief glance at the rest of the human record suggests something closer to “deeply flawed but unusually self-correcting.” Ask Black Americans who have traveled abroad, really ask them, about Japan or Italy or Ireland or South Korea, and ask where they felt more at ease.
So yes, I see the frustration. I feel it too. What I cannot understand is how that very real anger turns into historical and intellectual amnesia, waving off the Constitution, excusing people who smeared feces on marble walls in the Capitol while beating police officers, or develop a soft spot for strongmen who poison rivals, murder journalists and dream aloud about re-drawing borders. I watch people who call themselves conservatives sneer at NATO, the alliance that has kept Europe from repeatedly setting itself on fire for seventy-five years, flutter their eyelashes at Vladimir Putin like he’s some kind of clarity-dispensing life coach, and nod gravely at the idea of invading Greenland as if this is statesmanship rather than a boyish dare someone lost.
I don’t hear conservatism in that. I hear a kind of selective memory, the political equivalent of walking into a room and forgetting why you came in there, except the room is history and the consequences are real. But I’d like to hear from you. But that requires you to be a man, and engage with the merits of my argument instead of saying things like “Greg, you sound like you jerk off in front of the mirror.”
Which is very imaginative, Ralph. But the substance is lacking. And I’m not going to confirm or deny that accusation Ralph. But frankly it’s none of your business.
What would be so much more productive is if you were man enough to get a beer with a guy who has served our country in uniform and tell me what is making you so unhappy. And you’d find that you like me. You might even become my friend. I have many friends who are Trump supporters. Because we’re not the thinkers of our thoughts. I didn’t choose to have the mental and emotional wiring and nervous system I have that gave me the beliefs I have any more than you did. We’re just two people trying to feel ok in this world. So why can’t I be decent to you?
And the world does not need more clever cynics. One more guy who imagines all his comments are mic drops. We need more love. More curiosity. More mercy, and forgiveness. We need to recognize the humanity in one another. And realize that at the root of our character flaws as adults are moments in our childhood when you felt unloved. There is a scared child…in all of us.
That’s it for now.
