U.S. Interventions in Latin America: A Short History

Summary

Podcast Summary: U.S. Interventions in Latin America: A Short History

Podcast: Dan Snow's History Hit
Episode Date: January 12, 2026
Host: Dan Snow
Guest: Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire and Professor at Northwestern University

---

Overview of the Episode's Main Theme

This episode examines the long, often controversial history of U.S. interventions and influence across Latin America, set against the modern backdrop of recent interventions under President Donald Trump. Dan Snow and historian Daniel Immerwahr explore the roots of American expansionism, the transformation of U.S. imperial approaches, and the cyclical nature of informal and formal power in the Western Hemisphere. The conversation traces from the Monroe Doctrine to contemporary "Dunro Doctrine" discourse, analyzing motives, methods, and consequences of nearly two centuries of U.S. involvement in its "backyard."

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Foundations of U.S. Expansionism

• Conquest as American Character:
  • The U.S. was forged through expansion and conquest, similar to other empires (Britain, Spain, France).
  • Daniel Immerwahr (05:58): "The United States starts out way smaller than it currently is...only through a series of wars and purchases that it sort of fills out that familiar shape."
• Population Preferences and Racism:
  • Expansion was often strategic to avoid incorporating large non-white populations, e.g., the U.S.-Mexico border after the Mexican-American War.
  • Immerwahr (08:00): "US leaders want lands, but not densely populated land...it doesn't want heavily populated territory that would then have to incorporate those people."

2. The Monroe Doctrine and Its Legacy

• Origins and Misconceptions:
  • The Monroe Doctrine began as an unenforceable notion that Europe should not meddle in American affairs.
  • Immerwahr (08:49): "The Monroe Doctrine is one of the most massively known, misunderstood things in U.S. history...It is three non sequential paragraphs in a...State of the Union address."
• Roosevelt Corollary and 'Big Stick' Policy:
  • In the early 20th century, Teddy Roosevelt reinterpreted the doctrine to justify active U.S. intervention throughout the hemisphere.
  • Immerwahr (10:04): "He then said...the United States has a right to, quote, unquote, protect the Americas from European interference, which might involve, I don't know, running their customs houses."

3. Formal vs. Informal Empire

• From Colonization to Control:
  • As the U.S. matured, direct colonial endeavors gave way to subtler forms of domination—controlling local economies, militaries, and politics without outright annexation.
  • Immerwahr (13:32): "We often call that informal empire...all the substance of empire without none of the officialities."
  • Bloody counter-insurgency wars (e.g., the Philippines) led to greater preference for less direct intervention strategies.
• Dollar Diplomacy and Gunboat Diplomacy:
  • The U.S. routinely intervened militarily in Caribbean and Central American nations, seizing economic institutions (like customs houses) to exert dominance.
  • Immerwahr (14:39): "Let's be clear. It's by sending in the Marines. You sent in the Marines...and you seize the customs houses."

4. The Post-WWII Era and Cold War Interventions

• Decline of Formal Empire:
  • The aftermath of WWII hastened the end of open colonialism. The U.S. granted independence to the Philippines and made territories like Hawaii and Alaska states but retained indirect control over Puerto Rico and other territories.
  • Immerwahr (16:21): "By 1965, it's more like one out of 50 who are colonized...The United States has an enormous amount of power, and it doesn't generally try to express that power...by seizing acres."
• Cold War Covert Operations:
  • The U.S. used both "carrot and stick": compliant governments received aid, while defiant ones faced coup attempts or intervention.
  • 64 attempted U.S. interventions/overthrows during the Cold War, with 25 successful.
  • Immerwahr (19:10): "States that defy the United States are likely to find themselves on the wrong end of a coup attempt."

5. U.S. Motives: Economic and Political

• Resource Protection vs. Ideological Fears:
  • Some coups and interventions (e.g., Guatemala 1954) were to protect American business interests; others were driven by anti-communism and systemic credibility concerns.
  • Immerwahr (21:20): "Some interventions do seem motivated...by there is this resource in this country and it's being nationalized...But the United States is also interested in the system."

6. Tactical Details and Memorable Covert Interventions

• Guatemala 1954 as a Case Study:
  • The U.S. used psychological warfare, disinformation, and radio broadcasts (Radio Swan) to create panic and topple the government threatening United Fruit's dominance.
  • Immerwahr (22:48): "It's a coup attempt...But what you have to do is get a critical mass of people...thinking this is going to happen."
  • Notable radio disinformation: "The fish will rise tonight. You know, Pedro is in the house. These mean nothing, but they sound like they're orders to battalions that are about to invade."
• The Legacy of Puppet Regimes:
  • Pro-U.S. coup leaders often failed to govern stably, leading to cycles of violence and repression.
  • Immerwahr (25:49): "Those people are really bad at governing...Castillo Armas doesn't hold on for that long. The story of Guatemala is...cycles of repression and violence."

7. Contemporary Parallels and Trump Era

• The 'Dunro Doctrine':
  • Trump’s brashness in asserting U.S. hemispheric control recalls the imperial era, now rebranded with memes and new rhetoric but deeply anchored in history.
  • Dan Snow (02:25): "Trump...sort of asserting that the Western hemisphere was the USA's hemisphere...a direct echo of early 20th century images of Uncle Sam bestriding the Americas."
• Show of Force Without Boots on the Ground:
  • Recent operations, such as the abduction of Maduro, echo tactics from Noriega’s capture, emphasizing surgical interventions over costly occupations.
  • Immerwahr (24:36): "You want shows of force and you want decisive, scary, surprising acts..."
• Return of ‘Annexation Talk’:
  • Trump's public musing about acquiring Greenland, occupying Venezuela, and (briefly) annexing territory marks a rhetorical regression to 19th-century thinking.
  • Immerwahr (29:13): "It's a really startling reversion to the kind of politics...19th and early 20th century forms of politics."

---

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Motivations for Expansion:
  • Immerwahr: "It is only through a series of wars and purchases that it sort of fills out that familiar shape." (05:58)
• On the Monroe Doctrine:
  • Immerwahr: "It is three non-sequential paragraphs in a...State of the Union address...no enforcement mechanism...just a kind of articulation, speculation of a we would like it if this didn't happen." (08:49)
• On Informal Empire:
  • Snow: "So they kind of take the bits that they want."
  • Immerwahr: "They take the bits they want, yeah." (15:18)
• On U.S. Coup Playbook:
  • Immerwahr: "It's a coup attempt...try to create such a sense of panic and inevitability that it will bring the government down. So part of that is...a high-powered radio station...blasting disinformation." (22:48)
• On Symbolic Bluster vs. Direct Action:
  • Immerwahr: "Trump wants control of oil sales and oil production in Venezuela. And if he can have that, he would let the rest go hang." (15:30)
• On Contemporary Rhetoric:
  • Immerwahr: "Trump seems completely uninterested in making that kind of argument...He just started talking about oil: ‘We want their oil, our oil, as he called it.’" (31:37)

---

Important Segment Timestamps

• 02:25: Dan Snow introduces the Monroe Doctrine, Trump’s “Dunro Doctrine,” and the trope of U.S. hemispheric dominance.
• 05:34: Opening discussion on U.S. expansion as a project of conquest.
• 08:00: The rationale behind U.S. choosing which territories to annex.
• 08:49: Origins, meaning, and legacy of the Monroe Doctrine.
• 10:04: Teddy Roosevelt’s corollary—U.S. policing the Americas.
• 13:32: The mechanics of informal empire and dollar/gunboat diplomacy.
• 16:21: WWII and the decline of formal empire for the U.S. and globally.
• 19:10: Cold War coups—scope and statistics for U.S. interventions.
• 22:48: The CIA coup in Guatemala and the role of psychological operations.
• 29:05: The Panama Canal zone as a gray area of empire; Trump’s appropriative rhetoric.
• 30:21: The Noriega case and its modern resonance.
• 31:17: Trump’s break with “rules-based order” rhetoric.

---

Conclusion

The conversation with Daniel Immerwahr powerfully illustrates the deep historical roots and persistent realities underlying U.S. interventions in Latin America. While presidents and tactics have shifted—from outright war and annexation, to covert coups, to economic pressure and information warfare—the episode reveals a consistent drive for influence, up to and including the current administration. By connecting the dots from the Monroe Doctrine to today’s headlines, the show provides an accessible yet nuanced primer on why and how the U.S. has long sought to “take care of business” in its own backyard.

---

Transcript

[Ad Host/Commercial Announcer]

Everywhere you turn it's New Year, New Me. But growth isn't a glow up trend, it's a practice. Grow Therapy helps you do the real work with licensed therapists who meet you where you are, not where anyone else says you should be. Whether it's your first time in therapy or your 50th, grow makes it easier to find a therapist who fits you, not the other way around. They connect you with thousands of independent licensed therapists across the US offering both virtual and in person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters like insurance, specialty, identity or availability and get started in as little as two days. And if something comes up, you can Cancel up to 24 hours in advance at no cost. There are no subscriptions, no long term commitments, you just pay per session. Grow helps you find therapy on your time. Whatever challenges you're facing, Grow Therapy is here to help. Sessions average about $21 with insurance and some pay as little as $0 depending on their plan. Grow accepts over 100 insurance plans, including Medicaid in some states. Visit GrowTherapy.com Acast today to get started. That's GrowthTherapy.com Acast Growth Acast availability and coverage by state and insurance plan.

You know what's wild? Most people are still overpaying for car insurance just because it's a to switch. That's why there's Jerry. Jerry's the only app that compares rates from over 50 insurance in minutes and helps you switch fast with no spam calls or hidden fees. Drivers who save with Jerry could save over $1,300 a year. Before you renew your car insurance policy, do yourself a favor, download the Jerry app or head to Jerry AI Acast.

We interrupt this program to bring you an important Wayfair message. Wayfair's got style tips for every home. This is Stiles Mackenzie helping you make those rooms sing. Today's Style Tip when it comes to making a statement, treat bold patterns like neutrals. Go wild like an untamed animal print area rug under a rustic farmhouse table. From wayfair.com fierce this has been your Wayfair style tip to keep those interiors superior. Wayfair Every style, Every home Foreign.

[Dan Snow]

Welcome to the podcast. Donald Trump has embraced the Dunro doctrine off the back of that extraordinary special forces raid, the exfiltration of the Venezuelan leader Maduro. He's talked about U.S. interventions in Cuba and Mexico, Colombia, even Greenland. Trump's State Department posted a picture of Trump sort of asserting that the Western hemisphere was the USA's hemisphere. Other supporters have been posting Cartoon images of Trump towering above the Americas dominating the continent, which is so fascinating. A direct echo of early 20th century images of Uncle Sam bestriding the Americas as previous generations of US Policymakers flex their muscles in north and South America. Because, folks, you must be bored of me saying this on the podcast, but none of this is new. We have seen those same cartoons. Just even the expression Dunro Doctrine. It's a witty, historic play on words. It harks back to the famous Monroe Doctrine. Now, that was a. Well, it began as an idea, really, the musings of that President Monroe in the 1820s, with an eye on the Spanish colonies of Central and South America. A little bit of British activity here and there as well. Monroe gave a clear signal that Europe's time for interfering in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere were at an end. This theme was enlarged upon by subsequent presidents. It became the famous Monroe Doctrine, the idea that the Western Hemisphere was the United States of America's sphere of influence. And for the last 200 years since Monroe, the US has expressed that commitment in a number of different ways. It's tried invasion a fair bit. It's tried annexed territory here and there, like Puerto Rico. It's deposed plenty of governments, snatched a couple of leaders like Noriega from Panama in 1989 or Maduro from Venezuela just a few days ago. It has tried to kill others like Castro, many, many times. The USA has long been drawn. It's long been interested in exploiting the abundant natural resources of its southern well and its northern neighbors. But Donald Trump and his advisors are happier than most to be forthright in their discussion of that. So I think this is a really good time to talk about the USA and its different approaches to ruling, controlling, influencing, coercing its neighbors. I'm very lucky to have Daniel Imavar on the podcast. He wrote the very successful how to Hide an Empire. He is the Bergen Evans professor in the Humanities at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. He's a fantastic historian and communicator, and he's going to help us understand how the USA seeks to take care of business in its own backyard.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

T minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

[Dan Snow]

God save the king.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

No black white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

[Dan Snow]

Daniel, thank you so much for coming on this podcast.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Absolutely, Dan. It's a pleasure to be here.

[Dan Snow]

Now, I don't want to be tough on the usa. I think it's nearly Every country in the world is forged in the heat of conquest. Britain certainly is, France, Spain, Germany, Russia, China. But you do see in the birth and growth of the usa, don't you? This is a project of. Of conquest, of expansion.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Yeah, absolutely. So the United States starts out way smaller than it currently is. So you have that sort of familiar image on your mind of what it looks like on the ma. It was nowhere near that size. And it is only through a series of wars and purchases that it sort of fills out that familiar shape. And it's not just that it is pushing away its imperial rivals, European powers, to do so. It is also dispossessing native nations within the borders that it claims from those European rivals. To the point where even when it is purchasing territory, as in the case of the Louisiana Purchase, the United States is fighting tooth and nail for many parts of that ground.

[Dan Snow]

They beat the Brits, they buy a chunk of territory off Napoleon, they invade Florida, they're fighting indigenous peoples the whole time. Then you got the Mexican American War. This is a dynamic empire in the.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

19Th century, wildly so by the end of the 19th century, the United States looks nothing like it looked at the start of the 19th century.

[Dan Snow]

Explain to me how the American government sold that. They were saying this was something different to these kind of European empires, were they not?

[Daniel Immerwahr]

All the time, Interestingly so, especially by the end of the 19th century, the dominant strain in politics is the United States is a big boy and considered the big boys table. And to do that is to be an empire, just like Britain, just like France. And that's what we've been doing the whole time in the west, the leaders say. And that's what we would like to do overseas as well. So there is a kind of vacillation in the United States because on the one hand it had been a colony, so a lot of its founding documents have an anti colonial or anti imperial animus. On the other hand, it does a lot of violent expansion. And so throughout the 19th century, you see leaders trying to figure out exactly how to talk about it, but often they're fairly proud of the expansion part.

[Dan Snow]

And there were some pretty big plans. I mean, why stop on the Rio Grande? Weren't there ideas about absorbing really, really significant further parts of, for example, Mexico in the 1840s and 50s? Why did it stop where it did in terms of its kind of lower 48 shape?

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Yeah. The pattern that you tend to see is that US leaders want lands, but not densely populated land, because what they want to do with the land is fill it with white settlers. And so when the United States wins a war with Mexico and occupies Mexico City, it has the option of taking as much of Mexico as it wants, including some people are talking about take all Mexico. And what you see instead is a sort of carefully curated border that gives the United States as much of Mexico as it can get with as few Mexicans. The idea being that it doesn't want heavily populated territory that would then have to incorporate those people into the country. It just wants a space that it can then fill with its own people.

[Dan Snow]

Tell me about the Monroe Doctrine, because this is something that is being talked about a lot at the moment. And this is 1820s. This is a long time ago.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so first of all, Dan, I need to correct you. We now call it the Donroe Doctrine.

[Dan Snow]

I heard.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Yeah. Very exciting development in the United States. Okay, so the Monroe Doctrine is one of the most massively known, misunderstood things in U.S. history, including its title. We call it a doctrine as if it had had any kind of force or had been intended as such. It is three non sequential paragraphs in a equivalent of a State of a Union address, an annual message to Congress in which the United States or the President of the United States articulates a principle that it would be great if European powers didn't interfere any more than they already have done in the Americas. There's no enforcement mechanism. It's not a law, it's not voted on. It's just a kind of articul speculation of a we would like it if this didn't happen. But it doesn't push Europe out of the Americas. Europe still has colonies in the Americas. And it also doesn't do the thing which Donald Trump is really excited about, which is it doesn't give the United States any particular power over the rest of the Americas. And it wasn't intended to.

[Dan Snow]

Sounds to me, Daniel, like the Monroe document might be your version of Magna Carta. Didn't really matter at the time and hardly anyone noticed it happening. But it's that it's imbued later on with all these generations of people talking about it suddenly has this thing of great.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Right. It takes a while before anyone calls it a doctrine. And I think a big moment is in the 20th century when one of the more jingoistic and bellicose presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, then said, okay, actually the real implication of the Monroe Doctrine. He then said, the thing that Trump got excited about is it's not only that European powers oughtn't to meddle in the Americas they oughtn't to do so because that is the job of the United States. The United States has a right to, quote, unquote, protect the Americas from European interference, which might involve, I don't know, running their customs houses or something like that.

[Dan Snow]

Okay, and, Daniel, that's interesting, because that's Roosevelt. That's the early 20th century when this project of filling in the map of what we now call the lower 48 states, so new England down to Florida, across to California, up to Pacific Northwest, that's sort of largely complete by that point. So is Roosevelt now pivoting? Are they thinking, okay, so what's next? What's going on in the neighborhood?

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Yeah, so it takes a while not only for the United States to assemble all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, to click them into place to generate the familiar silhouette of the country. That takes into the 1850s, but then it actually takes a while for those places to be effectively under US Control because they are under native control into the late 19th century. And at the moment when it looks like the United States has assembled a lot of that territory, pacified its own territory, then there is a debate which Teddy Roosevelt plays a part, which is, what is step two or what is phase two? And some people argue, there's a very influential argument at the time, associated with a guy called Frederick Jackson Turner, that the act of expanding and the act of confronting native people, in fact, has been so constitutive to the U.S. character, to U.S. politics, that it would be a political loss to have no more frontier. And Turner isn't exactly clear what, you know, he says, well, maybe this just means that we're entering a new phase. But for people like Roosevelt, the answer is, oh, we need to make more frontier. And so first there's a kind of burst of colonization that includes Puerto Rico, the occupation of Cuba, the annexation of the Philippines. And then there's also a kind of interest in other forms of control. And those are the things that Roosevelt is talking about when he articulates the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

[Dan Snow]

Okay, so, yeah, look, you just mentioned a full annexation. So this is empire. This looks a lot like what the British are doing. And so the Americans at that point are like, we can get into that game. Our founding documents don't kind of force us down a different path.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

They're quite explicit about this. And they have a kind of moment where they have to think, well, what did we mean by those founding documents? Clearly, they shouldn't limit our ability to annex the Philippines. And so you have people like Roosevelt saying, okay, yeah, these Republican principles are important, but they were always implicitly just for white people. Like they can't possibly apply more broadly. Look what we've been doing to the Apaches, you know, like, we clearly didn't mean it then. So the United States kind of figures out a way to racially bound its founding principles. Well, they always kind of had been racially bounded, but to explicitly do so so that it can proudly take in colonies and start to emulate Britain.

[Dan Snow]

And yet there's also a different kind of American imperialism, which is actually, as you say, we don't really want to take control of vast tracts of land with lots of tiresome people in it who need roads building and schools building and expensive insurrections putting down. So talk me through this other type of American control in this hemisphere.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Yeah, so we often call that informal empire. And the idea is that it doesn't have the formal trappings of empire. You don't run someone's flag down the flagpole and run yours up, but you have effective control. So it's all the substance of empire without none of the officialities of it. So part of that happens when the United States annexes the Philippines and gets into an incredibly bloody war in order to put down Filipino nationalism. A war that kills hundreds of thousands of people, a war that seems as if it kills more people than the U.S. civil War. And after that, even jingoists feel bruised and start to see that there might be a virtue in a different kind of control. And so right after the United States has annexed a number of places, including the Philippines, it starts to engage in what historians call dollar diplomacy or gun bullet diplomacy, which basically involves the United States taking effective control of a number of countries around the Caribbean, but not annexing them.

[Dan Snow]

Is that by building a canal, building a port, and then effectively controlling the economic vitals of the country without having to actually.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Oh, no, no, no, let's be clear. It's by sending in the Marines. Okay, that's step one. Yeah, yeah, you sent in the Marines. You sent in the Marines. In the case of the Dominican Republic, which is the country that Roosevelt had in mind when he was declaring the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. You send in the Marines and you seize the customs houses. And so there is a lot of occasions where the United States takes control of the foreign policy of a Caribbean or Central American state, takes control of the military, takes control of the economic policy, but is kind of happy to allow local politicians to deal with local political issues, and officially hasn't annexed those places.

[Dan Snow]

So they kind of take the bits that they want.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

They take the bits they want, yeah.

[Dan Snow]

So the Customs House, just so people are clear what we're talking about, the trade, I don't want to get too brash here, but unlike stealing tankers as they're arriving and leaving from a certain Venezuelan ports, for example.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Yeah, that's exactly right. You can see the things that Trump wants and the things that Trump doesn't particularly want. I don't think Trump is eager to govern Venezuela. I think Trump wants control of oil sales and oil production in Venezuela. And if he can have that, he would let the rest go hang.

[Dan Snow]

And to be clear, that does place Trump within along an ancient American tradition.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Yeah, that's true. Trump looks a lot like presidents around the late 19th century, early 20th century.

[Dan Snow]

So you've got the brutal formal empire, the attempt to control territory, insurgency, savage counterinsurgencies, expensive, morally corrupting going on in the Philippines to the first and second world wars, which are in many ways Couch's anti imperial struggles. Do they deliver the same blow to those ideas of formal empire in the US that they do say in Britain and France and the Netherlands?

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Right, yeah. World War II, it doesn't end formal empire, which is still technically ongoing, and it certainly doesn't end the bulk of colonial arrangements immediately, but it really does do a number on formal empire. And if in 1930 about one in three humans on the planet is colonized, by 1965, it's more like one out of 50. So there's just a massive change. And that has a lot to do with World War II. And that happens in the United States too. So World War II, it doesn't exactly lead to. It's a little complicated how they relate. But right after World War II, the largest US colony, the Philippines, gets independence. And then two other large colonies, Alaska and Hawaii, they don't get independence, but they become states, which had been elusive for them for a while. And so the US still has today five inhabited territories. Puerto Rico is the largest. But it doesn't seek to expand its power, by and large by claiming large swaths of land. The United States has an enormous amount of power, and it doesn't generally try to express that power or expand that power by seizing acres.

[Dan Snow]

This is Dan Snow's history. Hit more after this.

[Ad Host/Commercial Announcer]

BetterHelp online therapy bought this 30 second ad to remind you right now, wherever you are, to unclench your jaw, relax your shoulders, take a deep breath in and out. Feels better, right? That's 15 seconds of self care. Imagine what you could do with more visit betterhelp.com randompodcast for 10% off your first month of therapy. No pressure, just help. But for now, just relax.

You know what's wild? Most people are still overpaying for car insurance just because it's a pain to switch. That's why there's Jerry. Jerry's the only app that compares rates from over 50 insurance in minutes and helps you switch fast with no spam calls or hidden fees. Drivers who save with Jerry could save over $1,300 a year before you renew your car insurance policy. Do yourself a favor, download the Jerry app or head to Jerry AI Acast.

[Dan Snow]

Tell me about I mean, it's obviously a huge subject, but there's a troubled history of particularly Central and South America and US imperialism there after the Second World War and how the US would make itself felt in those regions to achieve its aims.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Okay, so imagine that the United States is interested in some level of control, but also imagine that it doesn't want to take over colonies. Doing that is going to be a bad look for the Cold War. Doing that is going to lose it a lot of legitimacy in the Global South. It's going to be hard for the United States to say that it stands for freedom when it is sending in the Marines and running its flags up the pole. So what you see in the United States, and particularly in its so called backyard in Central America and Latin America more generally, is a sort of carrot and stick approach. So states that are compliant with the United States will get aid, and they'll particularly get military aid. And then states that defy the United States are likely to find themselves on the wrong end of a coup attempt. So over the course of the Cold War, the United States tries to intervene illegally to tilt an election or to just overthrow a government 64 times, and it succeeds 25 of those times.

[Dan Snow]

Wow. So it's almost once a year.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Yeah, it's fairly constant. And I mean, it's not just happening in Latin America, it's happening all over the globe. And it puts every leader in a very weird bind because if you are compliant with the United States, you've blocked the danger on one side, but you almost certainly will piss off your populace because you will have to do things that are politically unpopular, like just send tankers for free to the United States. So you've got a problem at home if you defy the United States, that might gain you some political legitimacy and popularity, but then you've got a problem with the United States and you See this kind of bifurcation where people have a really hard time holding the middle and you tend to get like hard right wing or hard left wing authoritarians because it's just the presence of the United States making political demands on weaker countries again and again creates an enormous amount of political instability.

[Dan Snow]

And what are US Aims here? Do they tend to be economic and inner focus or political? So maintaining a strict anti communist stance in the kind of political sphere? Or is it about oil in Venezuela, fruit companies elsewhere, making sure that American investments are protected and against nationalization? That bogeyman?

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Yeah. So I think there are two kinds. Some interventions do seem motivated at least in part by there is this resource in this country and it's being nationalized and we would like to prevent it from being nationalized or reverse its recent nationalization. So we're going in. And famously that happens in Guatemala. It happens in other places as well. But the United States is also interested in the system. So even in places where there seems to be little immediate economic benefit, like what resources is the United States going to get from Vietnam compared to how many lives it loses in Vietnam? And when you look at a place like Vietnam, you're not looking at just a rich set of resources that have to be stolen. You're looking at the United States wanting to maintain its credibility, wanting to show that at the end it will dig in its heels again and again and again until it gets what it wants, which is a way of kind of protecting its power in other countries and in some ways making it easier for the United States not to have to intervene every time because people will see what's happening in Vietnam and they're like, oh, that is a lot of napalm being expended. I don't want that to happen to my country.

[Dan Snow]

You mentioned Guatemala there in the 1950s, and I think that's such an interesting example. There's a powerful US Corporation, the United Fruit Company, local elected president sort of threatens their stranglehold and then the US launches this, we'd now call it a kind of Putinesque disinformation campaign, psychological warfare, like a mixed form of warfare that we think is terribly modern but feels like it was what was going on in the 1950s.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Yeah, so it's a coup attempt. But the question is, how do you do a coup? How do you actually pull that off? What you have to do is ideally you want a sort of critical mass of people thinking or people in power thinking this is going to happen. And since it's going to happen, I better be on the right side of it. So that's. Every coup is just always this game of are we feeling like the government's about to fall right now or are we feeling not? And sometimes you see them sort of vacillate and someone president resigns and then unresigns. So what the United States is trying to do in Guadalupe, Guatemala, is send in troops. Obviously that's going to be the main act of destabilization, but then create such a sense of panic and inevitability that it will bring the government down. And then officials in Guatemala will be like, all right, the government is clearly fallen. I'll cooperate with the new one. And so part of that is that it has this kind of high powered radio station outside of Guatemala called Radio Swan. And it just starts blasting like disinformation during the coup, including coded messages to non existent battalions. The fish will rise tonight. You know, like Pedro is in the house. These mean nothing, but they sound like they're orders to battalions that are about to invade. And it's all a way of just creating a sense of confusion and fear that will ultimately lead the relevant people to resign or the relevant people to decide, okay, I'm just going to side with the United States.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah. Because the Venezuela example recently is interesting because although Trump can be unpredictable, everyone does seem to agree that what he doesn't want to do is put boots on the ground. So he's assembled this vast amphibious strike force off the coast of Venezuela. But like you're describing, it seemed to me in a kind of destabilizing way to freak out Venezuelan decision makers. He's not expecting his bluff to be called on. For him to have to land 15,000 men on a beach in Venezuela and risk the terrible casualties and the blowback that might result.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Yeah, I mean, warfare is always like that.

[Dan Snow]

Right.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

You kind of hope that you can, to use the term of another US President, shock and awe the enemy into just surrendering because you don't want to have to fight to every last man. That's going to be exhausting for everyone. You want shows of force and you want decisive, scary, surprising acts. And I think the White House has, especially in the last decades, become very entranced with the idea that it might solve its political problems with airstrikes that we have such power to, as the US Military sometimes puts it, put warheads on foreheads and to just target exactly the right people that the United States could do. These so called surgical strikes could come in, do exactly what they want, and leave. That's the fantasy, I'm not sure that that's the reality. That was also the fantasy of a recent US President, George W. Bush. That was how he envisioned the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq going. And instead they led to bloody, prolonged, expensive occupations.

[Dan Snow]

Let's finish off Guatemala, because you do get a pro US regime.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Yeah.

[Dan Snow]

The interests of the fruit company are protected, but does he fall foul of the process you're describing, which is his inhabitants think he sold out to the.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

U.S. yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, the guy who comes in, he'd been trained by the US military. I mean, part of military aid is that a lot of foreigners actually have sort of trained on US basis. He's a colonel called Carlos Castillo Armas. And according to Richard Nixon, who's the Vice President at the time, Castillo Armos had told him, tell me what you want me to do and I will do it. And that looks like a massive win from the perspective of the United States. What more could you want? What more fawning puppet could you want? Just tell me what you want to do and I will do it. The problem is those people are really bad at governing. Those people are really bad at holding onto power. Castillo Armos doesn't hold on for that long. And the story of Guatemala is not the story of just an stable, popular, prosperous regime. It's the story of cycles of repression and violence and insurgency. The post coup history of Guatemala is just a really tragic one. But actually that's true in a lot of countries. There's a political scientist called Lindsey o' Rourke who just looked at what happens to countries after the United States tries to overthrow the government. And the answer is they are more likely to clash with the United States, they're more likely to have a subsequent coup, and they're more likely to engage in massacres against civilians, all because of that dynamic of you either have to please the United States or you have to please people who are very pissed at the United States. And it's really hard to find a stable ground between those.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah, you wouldn't want to be in the shoes of the current ruler of Venezuela, the successor of Maduro in Venezuela, Delsey Rodriguez.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

What is she going to do? Yeah, and you hear it coming from both sides, right? On the one hand, she seems to be telling the United States, you know, it's okay, you don't need to take me out too. I'll just do what you want. But then it's quite clear that within Venezuela, the position of the regime has to be. This is a grave outrage. And you know I can't believe that this happened, and we're decisively opposed to this. I don't know how long she's going to be able to keep doing both those things.

[Dan Snow]

We should quickly mention Panama, because the Panama Canal was something that Trump talked a lot about in his early months. In this second term, it's gone a little bit more quiet now, although it's been mentioned again more recently. Panama is an interesting one because the US Paid for and constructed this gigantic infrastructure project, the Panama Canal. In doing so, was that annexed territory or was it licensed, or what was its relationship like with the government of Panama while that was going on? Yeah.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

So, first of all, let's just do a little geography. The Panama Canal goes through Panama. So the Panama Canal Zone is just a belt that goes from one side of Panama to another side. So to have any foreign power controlling the Panama Canal or the Panama Canal Zone is basically to make Panama discontiguous, that you would not be able to get from one part of Panama to another, because you'd have to pass through this belt, the Panama Canal Zone. So what was it? Yeah. So the United States, through a series of political machinations, managed to gain control of the Panama Canal Zone. It never technically annexed it, but it operated it with such uncontested control and on such a powerful lease that it was virtually as if the United States had annexed it. And to the point where the United States would include the Panama Canal Zone in the US Census, it was largely felt to be part of the United States, even though it was just a notch below technically a territory.

[Dan Snow]

So this is one of those gray areas of formal, informal empire. And yet Trump talks about it a lot. So at what stage has the US Grip on that sort of loosen?

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Yeah, first of all, I want to clarify, there's a lot of places where the United States has control but not sovereignty. The Panama Canal Zone is a place that looks really close to sovereignty. It's sort of like Guantanamo Bay in that regard or many of the US Military bases. So, yeah, it's interesting that Trump was seeking to reclaim the Panama Canal Zone. That's not the only thing that he's asked for. He's sought to annex Greenland, he's talked about making a state of Canada. He talked about taking an ethnic, technically cleansed Gaza and building it out, but it would be also owned by the United States. And all of this is a really startling reversion to the kind of politics that you and I were just talking about, the 19th and early 20th century forms of politics. And it's a startling reversion because although the United States has sought to throw its weight around, it's had numerous designs on numerous countries. The idea of actually claiming, conquering, or purchasing in some way annexing another country, that has really been off the menu for US Presidents in every kind of relevant sense for decades. It's not something they have talked about, but it's also, I think, not something they've sought.

[Dan Snow]

Panama is an interesting example as well, because I remember we were all obsessed with the case of Noriega, who was a sort of shadow leader in Panama. And perhaps not wholly unlike the Venezuela example, he was removed and sent for trial in the US not quite a snatch operation, but not a million miles off in the 1980s.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

No, it was a bloodier operation and involved more sort of urban street fighting. There's debates about how many people were killed, but 500 to thousands would be a reasonable thing to think. So it was a messier operation in that sense, but it had the kind of pattern that I think Trump is hoping for, which is the United States went in, got its guy, brought the guy to trial and left, and that was it, and then swore the new guy in on a US Military base in the Panama Canal Zone as it happened. And I think Trump is hoping that Venezuela will look like the 1989 US invasion of Panama rather than, say, the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

[Dan Snow]

All of which makes me feel that while some people have been wringing their hands about how just this is such a departure, the USA is abandoning the rules based international order. Something like Trump is acting within the mainstream, if you like, of US Strategy in its, quote, unquote, its own backyard.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Yeah, I think there are two differences. One is the difference in how Trump discusses it, because part of the rules based order was that you had to make some sort of reference to the rules, that this was an example of rules following, not of rules breaking. So even actions that seemed like aberrations were not challenges to the whole system or were not tearing up of the rule book. And Trump seems completely uninterested in making that kind of argument. So when he gave his astonishing press conference, he started out by saying, well, you know, this is because Maduro has broken some laws and we're going to try him for those laws. But then immediately, unbidden, he just started talking about oil. We want their oil, our oil, as he called it. So all of that kind of part of the rules based order seems to be out the window. And then, although Trump has only talked about occupying Venezuela to get its oil industry back on its feet. At the same time he has demanded to annexed Greenland. And that is different. In the past decades, presidents have not sought to colonize territory and that does feel like a real departure within the liberal international framework.

[Dan Snow]

Daniel, what a great place to end it. Tell everyone what your brilliant book is.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Called how to Hide an A History of the Greater United States.

[Dan Snow]

Fascinating stuff. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

[Ad Host/Commercial Announcer]

Great.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Thanks for having me.

[Dan Snow]

Well, thank you so much Daniel for coming on the podcast. I really enjoyed that conversation. We're going to be watching what happens very closely over the next few days, weeks and years I expect. And if there's any other history that you're looking for help to understand to have explained right now, then please send us an email. I will be on a Nile Felucca sailing gently the length of Egypt for the next few weeks. But thanks to the wonders of modern communications, and thanks to the fact that producer Mariana deforge is manning her workstation in swinging London, we will be able to see and respond to all of your wonderful ideas. So thanks for sending them in. Thank you of course, for listening. We'll next be chatting with you on Thursday when we're going to be doing something a bit different. I'll be telling you the story of the Dam Busters Raid Operation Chastise. You want special forces missions? I got one right here. We do it all on this show. Bye bye for now.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

When everything is moving all at once, your workforce, your tech stack, your business, you don't need more tools. You need one solution. That's why Paylocity built a single platform to connect hr, finance and IT with AI driven insights and automated workflows that simplify the complex and and power. What's next? Because when everything comes together in one place, growth comes easy experience. One place for all your HCM needs. Start now at paylocity.com 1.