by Greg Grandin
Picador USA
3/2/2021, paperback
SKU: 9781250753298
Empire's Workshop is the classic analysis of Latin America's role as proving ground for imperial US strategies and tactics, now in a thoroughly updated and revised edition.
Examining over a century of US intervention in Latin America, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin reveals how the region has long served as a laboratory for US foreign policy, providing generations of Washington policy makers with an opportunity to rehearse a broad range of diplomatic and military tactics--tactics that then were applied elsewhere in the world as the US became a global superpower. During the Great Depression, for instance, FDR's Good Neighbor policy taught the United States to use "soft power" effectively and provided a blueprint for its postwar "empire by invitation." In the 1980s, Reagan likewise turned to Latin America, but now to rehabilitate "hard power" after the debacle of Vietnam, putting the United States on the road to its current crisis: endless, forever wars.
This completely revised edition includes new information on the US invasion of Panama, US interventions in Cuba, Guatemala, and Chile, Plan Colombia and the War on Drugs, the Obama administration's involvement in the 2009 coup in Honduras, and the current crisis at the US-Mexico border, caused by decades of misguided Washington policies. Most provocatively, Grandin argues that the origins of many of the current threats to American democracy--disinformation, permanent surveillance, political extremism and out-of-control militarism--were foreshadowed in the United States' Central American policy.
Reviews:
"Read Empire's Workshop and the whole disastrous Bush adventure in Iraq suddenly appears as the logical continuation of a century of U.S. interventions in that sad laboratory called Latin America." -- Ariel Dorfman, The Guardian
"It was in Latin America that the U.S. government first honed its repertoire of imperial domination, often in the service of capital's relentless expansion. As Grandin shows, perhaps the most effective of these weapons is ideological: the steadfast denial that the U.S. is an empire at all." -- Thea Riofrancos, author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador
"If you want to know why the American intervention in Iraq has failed, look at the El Salvador of a quarter-century ago... Nixon observed that the U.S. could do what it wanted in Latin America because his compatriots didn't give a damn about the place. Grandin's excellent book makes a good case for caring." -- Kirkus Reviews
About the Author:
Greg Grandin is the author of The End of the Myth, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Fordlandia, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His widely acclaimed books also include The Last Colonial Massacre, Kissinger's Shadow, and The Empire of Necessity, which won the Bancroft and Beveridge awards in American history. He is Peter V. and C. Van Woodward Professor of History at Yale University.