Michael Grow . U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War . Lawrence : University Press of Kansas . 2008 . Pp. xiv, 266. $34.95.

Abstract

In undertaking the research for this monograph, Michael Grow set out to explore the economic and national security concerns that led the United States to intervene repeatedly in Latin America during the Cold War. After reviewing the evidence, however, he concluded that the traditional framework had to be jettisoned in favor of one that emphasized the role of Latin American actors, U.S. domestic politics, and, above all, U.S. credibility. Through eight tightly argued case studies (Guatemala, Cuba, British Guiana, Dominican Republic, Chile, Nicaragua, Grenada, and Panama), Grow refutes both the realist and revisionist schools of interpretation, which have insisted that anticommunism and U.S. corporate interests lay at the root of U.S. interventionism in Latin America during the Cold War. Instead, he argues, scholars need to grapple with why so many U.S. presidents felt trapped into launching military interventions to save their domestic reputations and to prove to the world, as the elder George Bush once put it, that “what we say goes.”