Overthrow Summary
For such of new country, it sure has some history. The United States has been involved in some rocky “regime changes” throughout its history. In Overthrow, author Stephen Kinzer outlines those in which American influence was the deciding factor. The book is set up into three sections, titled for how the operations were grouped together: The Imperial Era, Covert Action, and Invasions. With each government interference, Kinzer seems to only point out where they went wrong. He simply doesn’t give America enough credit.
The first section of Overthrow explains “regime changes” based on imperialistic grounds. Because of this of this reason, the U.S. seemed to have no business overthrowing governments and could not handle them. However, he fails to realize how all of this is largely understandable. The United States of America has never been anything but an empire. The first European settlers came to the land as a colony and even after gaining independence, did nothing but push west while murdering and displacing millions of natives. All that mattered was the country gaining and keeping power. The mindset of the American
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All of these operations were carried out to protect America as well as other countries from the spread of communism. However, Kinzer doesn’t make it seem that way. Notably, the book fails to discuss the state of the world. The United States and the Soviet Union were the two biggest forces in the world, were not happy with each other, and both had nuclear missiles. There was a lot of pressure to keep the Soviets as far away from American territory as possible. When the government detected a threat, it acted swiftly as to prevent a bloody war that would destroy the world. The governments put in place in Guatemala, Chile, Iran, and South Vietnam were supposed to prevent the spread of the Soviet Union forces and therefore, protect the United States as a
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1090 Words | 5 PagesAdditionally, there is another example that proves this claim which can be seen through the Vietnam War: This is known as the Gulf of Tonkin. The year 1964 would mark the formal involvement of the U.S. entering the Vietnam War issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Having similar ideas like those of the CIA interventions, the U.S. also had intentions of stopping communism from happening in Vietnam. All starting because of two separate attacks on two US Navy destroyers: “U.S.S Maddox and U.S.S Turner Joy” (Gulf of Tonkin Resolution), the Gulf of Tonkin shows how similar to Operation Cyclone and Pearl Harbor it really was to the idea of increasing military supplies based on both threats of communism and threats of attacks, as well as gaining the support of Americans by justifying these threats as “major problems that must be taken care of all in the name of “protecting and serving our nation”.
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