There’s an old joke about why there are never coups in the United States: because there’s no US embassy.
True, the foundations of the joke have been somewhat shaken now that former President Donald Trump is accused of inciting a coup attempt in January 2021. However, not everyone agrees with the name coup – even among Trump’s critics.
Longtime US diplomat and former national security adviser to Trump, John Bolton, whose mustache Trump never liked, the Associated Press reported, in a recent interview with CNN about the congressional investigation into the matter, declared that it was “a mistake” to see the riot. as a “carefully planned coup”. In short, Trump was simply too incompetent to come up with something like that, according to Bolton: “As someone who has helped plan coups — not here, but, you know, elsewhere — that takes a lot of work.”
Of course, US involvement in foreign coups isn’t exactly news flash, and much has been written on the subject. For starters, check out former New York Times bureau chief Stephen Kinzer’s The Fall: America’s Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq — or the Washington Post’s 2016 finding that “the United States tried to change other countries’ governments 72 times during the Cold War. “.
But the nonchalance with which Bolton made his confession simply underscores the United States’ rather casual approach to turning nations and destroying lives en masse. This lack of institutionalized empathy is certainly evident in the regular international episodes of sustained US military slaughter.
And yet, given the apoplexy that US plantations find themselves in when other countries are thought to be meddling in things that aren’t theirs, the blatantly imperial posturing becomes all the more mind-numbingly hypocritical. Also, the US’s constant bragging about “democracy” is not easily reconciled with coups.
In the CNN interview, the only specific point Bolton raised in his biography of coup planning was the one in Venezuela in 2019, which “turned out to be unsuccessful.” Not to be confused with the 2002 US-backed coup in Venezuela that briefly toppled Hugo Chávez, the 2019 operation involved efforts to replace elected President Nicolás Maduro with right-wing figure Juan Guaidó, who had spontaneously declared himself interim president. country.
Venezuela has long been a thorn in the side of modern American empire because it refuses to bow to Washington’s hemispheric designs, but it’s the tip of the iceberg when it comes to coup-happy US meddling in Latin America and beyond.
For example, in 1954 the CIA staged a coup against the democratically elected leader of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, who had proven to be irritatingly attentive to the needs of the country’s peasantry and unwilling to allow the predatory US-based United Fruit Company. continue to use Guatemalan land as if it were a God-given right.
The coup against Árbenz paved the way for a brutal civil war that left over 200,000 Guatemalans dead or missing over 36 years. Most of the wartime atrocities were committed by US-backed government forces.
As it happened, key members of Dwight D Eisenhower’s administration had close personal ties to the United Fruit Company at the time of the coup. To hell with the separation of corporation and state.
Last year, in August 1953, the CIA overthrew Iran’s democracy in four days — as NPR says. Like Árbenz, Iran’s elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was not sufficiently subservient to the economic preferences of the existing powers. What followed was a long reign of torture by the Shah of Iran, an avid consumer of US weapons. Ervand Abrahamian, in his book Modern Iran, recalls that “arms dealers joked that the shah swallowed their manuals the same way other male Playboys do.”
The list goes on. There was a 1964 US-backed coup against Brazilian President João Goulart, a 1991 US-backed coup against Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a 2004 US-backed coup against President Aristide again, and a 2009 US-backed coup Against Manuel Zelaya of Honduras. – which plunged the country into more or less apocalyptic violence.
Rewind again to 1960 and the US-backed coup against Patrice Lumumba – Congolese independence hero and Congolese first democratically elected prime minister – whose assassination the following year was greatly facilitated by the CIA. Then there was the US-backed coup of 1 November 1963 against South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, who was assassinated the next day.
The US also supported the tyrannical Cuban dictator and coup d’état Fulgencio Batista, who toppled the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959 – after which the CIA worked on a dizzying array of plans to kill revolutionary leader and scuba diving enthusiast Fidel Castro, including one scheme involving exquisitely painted mollusks laden with explosives .
Obviously, none of those plots panned out and—what do you know? – Cuba continues to feature prominently on none other than John Bolton’s designated enemies list. In 2002, as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security under George W. Bush, head of the “war on terror,” Bolton had the honor of officially adding the small Caribbean island to the “Axis of Evil.”
Fast forward to 2019, and Bolton warned that the Cuban government would be next in line after Maduro’s death.
And while US malevolence obviously doesn’t always go as planned, it hasn’t stopped the global hegemon from making life a nightmare around the world with military bombs, death squads, crippling embargoes, and other far less creative but far-reaching measures. more destructive than exploding clams.
According to the aforementioned 2016 Washington Post report on 72 US regime change attempts during the Cold War, “interference in foreign elections is the most successful covert tactic.” The report’s author further notes that “covert regime change can devastate target countries,” making them “more likely to experience civil war, domestic instability, and mass murder.” you don’t say
Now, in the wake of Bolton’s possible revelation, the Post’s Philip Bump takes on the question: “What coup exactly could John Bolton have been involved in?” Using data from the Cline Center at the University of Illinois, Bump notes that since Bolton joined Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1982, there have been more than 350 coup attempts internationally, including events that might not be considered coups, such as the overthrow of the US-led government in Afghanistan” after 2001’s 11 .September attacks.
Of the more than 350 attempts, Bump writes, 191 occurred while Bolton was in the US government. However, Bump has taken the liberty of removing from the equation any attempts that “occurred while Bolton was at the [Justice Department] or USAID, assuming that his involvement in government-led shenanigans would have been limited.” Never mind that USAID, the US Agency for International Development, has been seriously exposed as a front for CIA operations.
In the end, Bump has determined that only 131 cases of coup attempts remain that may qualify for some sort of connection to Bolton. And yet, at the end of the day, it’s not really about Bolton at all; it’s about the haphazard, morally corrupt imperialism he happens to represent.
And as the “Century of American Regime Change” turns into centuries, it’s quite a coup indeed.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Al Jazeera editor.
