Perilous Partners

The Benefits and Pitfalls of America's Alliances with Authoritarian Regimes

Ted Galen Carpenter, Malou Innocent

• Publisher: Cato Institute
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781939709707
• eBook ISBN: 9781939709714
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Liberal democracies such as the United States face an acute dilemma in the conduct of foreign relations. Many states around the world are repressive or corrupt to varying degrees. Unfortunately, American national interests require cooperation with such regimes from time to time. To defeat Nazi Germany during World War II, the United States even allied with the Soviet Union, despite the barbarity of Josef Stalin's regime.

But such partnerships have the inherent danger of compromising, or even making a mockery of, America's values of democratic governance, civil liberties, and free markets. Close working relationships with autocratic regimes, therefore, should not be undertaken lightly. U.S. officials have had a less than stellar record of grappling with that ethical dilemma. Especially during the Cold War, policymakers were casual about sacrificing important values for less-than-compelling strategic rationales. Since the 9-11 attacks, similar ethical compromises have taken place, although policymakers now seem more selective than their Cold War-era counterparts.

In Perilous Partners, authors Ted Galen Carpenter and Malou Innocent provide a strategy for resolving the ethical dilemmas between interests and values faced by Washington. They propose maintaining an "arm's length relationship" with authoritarian regimes, emphasizing that the United States must not operate internationally in ways that routinely pollute American values. The degree of appropriate cooperation with an authoritarian regime should vary depending on the severity of the security threat the United States faces in each situation, how valuable a given ally is in meeting that threat, how odious is the ally's domestic conduct, and whether there are reasonable alternatives for achieving U.S. strategic objectives. It is a strategy based on ethical pragmatism, which is the best way to reconcile America's strategic interests and its fundamental values.

PART ONE



WASHINGTON’S QUESTIONABLE COLD WAR ALLIES

1. Uncle Sam’s Backyard: Friendly Latin American Strongmen

U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere since the late 19th century probably deserves an entry in the Hall of Shame. During that period, Washington meddled with increasing frequency in the internal affairs of its southern neighbors. From the 1890s through the mid-1940s, many of the interventions seemed to take place on behalf of powerful business enterprises with important interests in those countries. On other occasions, especially following the onset of the Cold War, ideological and strategic motives appeared to dominate U.S. decisionmaking, although the economic dimension never disappeared. The inclination to meddle was most pronounced regarding the small nations of Central America (often contemptuously labeled as “banana republics”) and the equally small and weak island nations of the Caribbean.

Ever since the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States took a special interest in political, economic, and military developments in the Western Hemisphere—especially with respect to the part of the region closest to the U.S. homeland. Monroe’s statement (actually written by then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams) emphasized that the United States would not tolerate either the establishment of new European colonies in the Western Hemisphere or European efforts to undermine the independence of the newly sovereign states there.

But Washington’s ability or inclination to do much about its concerns was decidedly limited throughout most of the 19th century. U.S. naval capabilities were quite modest and those of U.S. ground forces even more so. Indeed, in an example of irony, America’s longstanding rival, Great Britain, ended up being the principal enforcer of the Monroe Doctrine. Washington and London became de facto allies—with the British clearly being the senior partner—in preventing continental European powers from trying to establish colonies or puppet states in the region. American and British interests, while they continued to differ sharply on other issues, overlapped regarding that objective.

The United States shamelessly acted as a security free rider on British exertions in the Western Hemisphere. One of the few occasions that Washington prepared to take strong, unilateral action against a European interloper was in Mexico during the late 1860s. France took advantage of the U.S. Civil War to set up an Austrian client, Archduke Maximilian, as the so-called Emperor of Mexico. Once the Civil War ended, however, the United States openly backed Mexican insurgents and made it clear to France that any attempt to preserve its foothold in Mexico would be met with decisive force. Maximilian fell from power and was captured and executed by Mexican republican forces in 1867, and France did nothing in response.

It was after the Spanish-American War in 1898 and ouster of Spain from Cuba and Puerto Rico, though, that U.S. interventionism became a firmly established policy in the Western Hemisphere. Washington did keep its pledge to grant Cuba independence, with some regret on the part of avid imperialists who believed that William McKinley’s administration had made an impetuous, ill-advised promise. Yet even though the United States did not formally annex Cuba as a colony, the new country’s independence was severely circumscribed. The Platt Amendment, which Congress passed in 1901, gave the United States great latitude to intervene in Cuba if U.S. officials concluded that stability or good governance in that country was in peril.¹ And Washington exercised that authority on a number of occasions during the succeeding decades.

Roots of Intervention: The Quest for Stability and Order

The key goal with respect to Cuba was order and stability, and that became the mantra with respect to U.S. policy toward other countries in the region as well. The concern was not entirely selfish or hypocritical. One of the recurring problems throughout Central America and the Caribbean was the tendency of corrupt and/or unstable governments to renege on debts owed to foreign creditors. When those creditors were U.S. banks, policymakers in Washington got an earful from angry, well-connected constituents who wanted the federal government to do something about those deadbeat regimes.

Matters were even more delicate when the defaults occurred on debts owed to prominent European governments or financial institutions. U.S. leaders feared that a European country might well use a debt default as a justification—or a pretext—to establish a strong political, and perhaps even a military, presence in the offending country and convert it into a de facto colony.² A move to do that would, of course, be a direct challenge to the Monroe Doctrine. Suspicions about Imperial Germany’s intentions were especially strong in Washington during the early years of the 20th century. When Germany (along with Britain and Italy) imposed a naval blockade on Venezuela in 1902 to compel the government in Caracas to pay its financial obligations, President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration took action. Although London and Rome were also participants in the multilateral campaign of coercion against Venezuela, the bulk of Washington’s ire was directed at Berlin because of Imperial Germany’s growing assertiveness—often brash behavior—in other regions.

The president issued an implicit warning to Berlin in his 1904 State of the Union Address that the United States would not tolerate coercive moves in America’s backyard. At the same time, to sooth the German government and other European governments that were upset about the financial conduct of Venezuela, as well as certain nations in Central America and the Caribbean, Roosevelt pledged that the United States would ensure that its small neighbors would maintain adequate order and fulfill their commitments to foreign creditors—even if Washington had to intervene with its own military forces to do so. That policy became the so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

The Corollary quickly became an all-purpose justification for a series of U.S. military interventions in the region. Washington ousted regimes that it considered corrupt, incompetent, or just insufficiently compliant with U.S. wishes. That standard led to multiple missions in such places as Haiti and Nicaragua. Indeed, the U.S. military acted as the de facto government of Haiti continuously from 1915 to 1934.

Uncle Sam’s heavy hand was equally evident in Nicaragua. Brookings Institution scholar Robert Kagan succinctly summarizes Washington’s conduct: “The United States intervened with troops in 1912 and occupied Nicaragua for most of the next 21 years, assisted in a war against the [populist] rebel Augusto Cesar Sandino from 1927 to 1933, and was involved in the birth of the Somoza dynasty in 1936 and its perpetuation for another 43 years.” Kagan adds that “most informed Americans were not proud of that history.”³

Although the official rationale for such missions was the need to preclude major European powers from taking action against offending regimes, some of the episodes clearly were in response to pressure from domestic corporations, especially United Fruit (which became United Brands in 1970), which had massive economic stakes in those often unstable nations.⁴ And it soon became clear that leaders in Washington did not especially care whether a Central American or Caribbean regime was democratic or not—despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary. Instead, U.S. officials were concerned about whether a regime could maintain internal order and whether it would cooperate with Washington’s goals and those of relevant American business entities. In other words, U.S. administrations had few qualms about backing tyrants—even brutal tyrants—as long as they were sufficiently compliant and effective.

That approach characterized U.S. policy in the hemisphere from the early years of the 20th century to the mid-1930s. Washington’s approach shifted somewhat in 1933 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed the “Good Neighbor Policy,” which included a commitment not to intervene in the internal affairs of hemispheric countries unless there was a threat to the vital interests of the United States. Under both Roosevelt and his successor in the White House, Harry Truman, the parade of military interventions did come to an end. But it was more a shift of tactics than a fundamental policy change. For example, during the mid- and late 1930s, Roosevelt quietly sought to undermine regimes that he thought might be potential allies of the aggressive European fascist powers.⁵ Such covert activities might be considered a precursor to the similar, but much more systematic, efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) regarding hostile regimes in the post–World War II period.

Moreover, Washington expressed little criticism of friendly authoritarian regimes, of which there were an abundance throughout the Roosevelt and Truman years. In fact, Washington seemed to nurture Latin American military leaders who would later rise to power and impose rigid dictatorships with the blessing, if not outright sponsorship of, the United States. The pattern began even before FDR’s administration, and British journalist Grace Livingstone describes that aspect of U.S. policy: “In Central America and the Caribbean, which had borne the brunt of military intervention, the U.S. protected its interests by grooming friendly dictators.” Before the U.S. Marines withdrew from Nicaragua in 1933, the U.S. had “created, trained and equipped” a strong National Guard and appointed one Gen. Anastasio Somoza as commander. Somoza seized power from the civilian government in 1936. “The same tactic was used in the Dominican Republic, where Rafael Trujillo was appointed head of the U.S.-trained National Guard. Trujillo led a coup in 1930 and established a tyranny that lasted until 1961.” Livingstone notes that “by the mid-1930s, dictatorships had been established across Central America.”⁶

And U.S. officials seemed exceedingly tolerant of their authoritarian protégés. Livingstone describes the indulgent U.S. policy toward such leaders:

State Department officials built up a relationship with the corrupt and sadistic sergeant Fulgencio Batista, helping him to dominate the Cuban political scene. . . . Batista was invited to Washington to meet Roosevelt in 1938; Roosevelt personally met Somoza at the train station when he visited Washington in 1939, and Trujillo was invited for tea with the president and his wife at the White House in 1940. President Roosevelt had become, as Peruvian politician Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre said, “the good neighbor of tyrants.”⁷

The Cold War: Interventions Become More Ideological

During the Cold War, Washington’s tendency to intervene, either covertly or with military invasions, resurged. But intervention in the internal political affairs of Caribbean and Central American countries took on a more ideological aspect. As U.S. fears that Soviet influence might spread into the Western Hemisphere intensified, American policymakers were determined to prevent the emergence of left-wing regimes and to support virtually any ruler who professed to be anti-communist, regardless of that individual’s record of corruption or human rights abuses. Preventing the spread of communist regimes in Washington’s neighborhood also was the mantra for sending U.S. troops into the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983.

The U.S.-led intervention in the Dominican Republic thwarted a rebellion, led by some junior military officers, which sought to restore to office leftist president Juan Bosch, who had won election in 1962 but was deposed in a September 1963 military coup. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his advisers regarded the pro-Bosch insurgents as little more than pawns of Fidel Castro—and, therefore, of Moscow. According to Johnson, Bosch’s noncommunist supporters had “almost no control over the rebel movement. For the most part, power rested with the Communists and their armed followers.”⁸ The United States launched a military intervention, Operation Power Pack, with 42,000 troops to prevent Bosch’s return to the presidency. The intervention succeeded, and after complicated maneuvering, Washington placated resentful Dominicans with a promise of free elections the following year. U.S. financial and organizational assistance, both overt and covert, helped pave the way for a more pro-U.S. political figure, Joaquin Balaguer, to defeat Bosch in that election and take office.⁹

Balaguer had served as a loyal aide to Trujillo during the 1940s and 1950s, and his own rule during his first stint as president had more than a few authoritarian features, including the jailing of political opponents. Later in his political career, including several more nonconsecutive terms as president, his policies exhibited greater respect for human rights, and he even acquired a reputation as a genuine democratic reformer.¹⁰

Ronald Reagan’s explanation for the Grenada intervention nearly two decades later was virtually a duplicate of Johnson’s justification for the Dominican intervention. Officially, the United States was merely responding to a request from the obscure Organization of Eastern Caribbean States to reverse a coup by hard-line Marxists against a somewhat more moderate Marxist government under Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. According to Reagan, Grenada’s island neighbors “told us that under Bishop they had been worried by what appeared to be a large Cuban-sponsored military buildup on Grenada vastly disproportionate to its needs; now, they said, these even more radical Marxists in control of Grenada had launched a murderous reign of terror against their enemies. Unless they were stopped, the Caribbean neighbors said, it was just a matter of time before the Grenadians and Castro moved on their countries.”¹¹

Reagan certainly felt the same way, concluding that there “was only one answer” that he could give to the countries that had asked for Washington’s help. U.S. Marines soon went ashore, ousted the new regime, and restored order. Afterwards, Reagan stated that he “probably never felt better” during his entire presidency. “I think our decision to stand up to Castro and the brownshirts on Grenada not only stopped the Communists in their tracks in that part of the world but perhaps helped all Americans stand a little taller.”¹²

Countering perceived Soviet influence in the hemisphere was not confined to the Caribbean and Central America, although it was strongest in that region. Washington also forged ties with an assortment of right-wing (often military) regimes in South America—even in those portions of the continent that were geographically more distant than Europe from the U.S. homeland. As noted in chapter 2, the Reagan administration thought it improper to criticize the ruling junta in Argentina, which murdered (or “disappeared’) several thousand political opponents and kidnapped their young children for distribution to regime supporters. American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Falcoff concluded that the Argentine military “liquidated the terrorists and their accomplices. But it also abducted and murdered many who were guilty only of membership in left-wing political movements or intellectual circles, or only of being acquainted with someone who was.”¹³

Callousness about the junta’s behavior was not confined to the Reagan administration. Following the Argentine military’s seizure of power in March 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger seemed to go out of his way to assure junta leaders that Washington was not concerned about allegations of human rights violations. In a June meeting with the new foreign minister, Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti, Kissinger told Guzzetti: “We wish the new government well” and would do “what we can to help it succeed.” Kissinger stated that U.S. leaders understood that the Argentine regime was in a “difficult period. It’s a curious time, when political, criminal, and terrorist activities tend to merge without any clear separation.” He then gave a diplomatic green light to the junta’s developing crackdown on dissidents. “We understand you must establish your authority.”¹⁴

At a meeting with Guzzetti in October, Kissinger seemed even more solicitous, despite the mounting evidence of the pervasive abuses that would characterize Argentina’s “dirty war.” He assured Guzzetti: “I have an old-fashio...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION: CONFRONTING ETHICAL DILEMMAS IN U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
• PART ONE: WASHINGTON’S QUESTIONABLE COLD WAR ALLIES
• PART TWO AMERICA'S AUTHORITARIAN PARTNERS AFTER 9/11
• NOTES