Imperial Adventures
Nossiter, Bernard D.
BOOKS Imperial Adventures UNMANIFEST DESTINY by T.D. Allman Doubleday. 468 pp. $19.95. by Bernard D. Nossiter Great powers expand through force and violence, treachery and guile, hypocrisy and...
...The motives driving Polk, among them an increase in slave-holding regions, are quite different from those animating Theodore Roosevelt, who financed an uprising in Colombia to secure a cut-rate canal across Panama...
...Romans, Mongols, Spaniards, Russians under czars and commissars, Britons, Dutch, French, Japanese, Germans, and Americans have all built empires with similar tactics...
...It leaps forward and backward in time and space, blurring distinctions and erasing argument...
...Allman has provided distinguished reports from Cambodia and Central America to The Washington Post and other publications...
...interventions have been malign with the exception of World War II...
...In one breath, he speaks of "interventions in Greece, Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Laos," indiscriminately lumping together aid, subversion, and war...
...But this takes far too literally the official reasons given for the ventures abroad...
...But it is arguable that South Koreans, despite a nasty police state, live considerably better than they would have had Kim II Sung's invasion gone unchallenged...
...But the misuse of history in the service of contemporary ambition is another sign of great power...
...Allman seems to think that Americans suffer uniquely from a fantasy: "that Bernard D. Nossiter formerly was the United Nations bureau chief for The New York Times...
...He wrote "Soft State: A Newspaperman 's Chronicle of India "and is currently writing a book for the Twentieth Century Fund on economic conflicts between the developing and developed worlds...
...Indeed, it is difficult to see how the United States is menaced by Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, or Mexico, to name some in our "backyard" that have experienced American power...
...needless slaughter of civilians at Veracruz...
...But his passion has interfered with thought, and his book is muddled...
...His editors would have served him better by complimenting him on a rich first draft and sending him back to the typewriter...
...Allman believes all U.S...
...There are no exceptions...
...and a quiet compromise with the real superpower, a deal with Britain over Oregon...
...It is little wonder that he is consumed with passionate outrage at virtually every U.S...
...It was, rather, a doctrine of abstention, careful to recognize European power where it existed, cautious about extending any American commitments...
...oppression can create freedom, and that by imposing a regime of our own choosing on a foreign nation, we Americans can confer democracy on a conquered people...
...today, a diplomatic-military bureaucracy cannot grasp the change in the U.S...
...This, however, is not the kind of motive that interests Allman, and, in fact, he is far from clear about what lies behind the American urge to expand...
...Cuba as a missile base for the Soviets is a more plausible threat, but that has been precluded by superpower agreement...
...Allman, a fine journalist, has chosen to reflect on the American experience in Unmanifest Destiny, using President James Polk's war against Mexico in 1846 as the starting point for his examination of the imperial thrust...
...Similarly, Cubans under a rotting Spanish monarchy and successive dictatorships in Madrid might have been worse off than under the Batistas and Castros...
...He gives a fascinating account of the Reagan Administration's collaboration with the Salvadoran military to protect those who ordered the rape-murder of four American Catholic social workers...
...He is particularly interesting on the much misunderstood Monroe Doctrine which did not, as so many Presidents claim, license the United States to carry out unlimited intervention in the hemisphere...
...military action overseas...
...Moreover, it is ahistorical...
...Unlike recent adventures, the Mexican war yielded some handsome dividends— the annexation of Texas and the incorporation into the United States of California, Arizona, and New Mexico...
...Speculators holding Texas land scrip profited handsomely...
...by Bernard D. Nossiter Great powers expand through force and violence, treachery and guile, hypocrisy and blood...
...position and still tries to act on Truman's formula...
...Harry Truman, intoxicated by American power after World War II, proclaimed a doctrine to defend free people everywhere...
...their paper would have been worthless without annexation...
...Each period is quite different, but Allman tends to regard them as interchangeable...
...assault on a weaker nation, surrogate for an enemy world power...
...Allman is quite certain that security has little to do with American adventure...
...The war of 1846 had all the familiar ingredients—an invented act of aggression...
...They commit atrocities, slaughter hapless civilians, and proclaim holy motives to serve wicked deeds...
...Allman writes too vividly for so incoherent and repetitious a text...
Vol. 49 • January 1985 • No. 1
