MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
After the U.S. attack on Venezuela that seized Nicolas Maduro, President Trump said, quote, "American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again," unquote. He put Colombia, Cuba and Mexico on alert. There is a history of U.S. intervention in Latin America. Stephen Kinzer is the author of "Overthrow: America's Century Of Regime Change From Hawaii To Iraq." Our co-host Steve Inskeep asked him about what's unfolding in Venezuela.
STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: It appears that regime change is not the right phrase for what has happened here since the regime is still in place. So what is this kind of operation? What would you call it if it's not regime change?
STEPHEN KINZER: I think it's still in formation. I don't even think the people who launched this operation understand or have thought through what comes next. The vice president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, is a quite formidable woman. She's known and does know the American economic infrastructure in Venezuela. So it would be one option for the United States to try to govern through some remnant of the old regime. But whether a government that came to power as essentially anti-imperialist, which in Latin America always means anti-Yankee, would agree to be directed from Washington is very uncertain.
INSKEEP: OK. Granting that you have doubts that this is the way it's all going to work out in the end, the initial idea appears to be, from the United States' point of view, to leave the government in place and tell it what to do when the United States has something that they care about, such as Venezuelan oil. Is that a model that the United States has tried in other countries around the world over time?
KINZER: Absolutely. It comes from the Platt Amendment, which was passed very early in the 20th century. The Platt Amendment was passed to apply to Cuba, but it was later applied to many other countries. What it meant was that Cuba could be an independent country and could have its own government. But the United States would maintain a veto power over anything that government did and would not allow it to maintain independent relations with other countries. So that became a model, like in places - the Dominican Republic, in Venezuela itself under Perez Jimenez, in Nicaragua, in Guatemala, in Haiti. We didn't use the system that the British used where you sent a whole core of civil servants who would actually be the governor general and be in charge of everything. We did it differently, and that's the system that became known in Latin America as Plattismo after that Platt Amendment. And it looks like we're returning to a form of that now in Venezuela.
INSKEEP: Did this system go worldwide during the Cold War?
KINZER: No. It was particular to the American system in the Caribbean and what came out of the war of 1898. It is something that we did when we ruled the Philippines. But in most cases, the United States has thought not to carry out a colonial system. Even in Iran, for example, we wanted to rule through the shah. In the Congo, we ruled through Mobutu. We found it more efficacious to rule through local people than to put our own people on the ground as the actual decision-makers.
INSKEEP: I'm remembering a saying from the Cold War when someone might be talking about a dictator abroad and you would say, well, he might be an SOB, but he's our SOB.
KINZER: That is a quote that came from a Roosevelt administration official - quoted in Time magazine - speaking about Anastasio Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua.
INSKEEP: Oh, wow.
KINZER: And that is what ties together all of the leaders that the United States has overthrown in this region. I could sum it up in one word - defiance. These are all leaders who refused to accept the principle that the United States should dictate the outlines of their political and particularly economic policies.
INSKEEP: I'm thinking of the benefits from the United States' point of view of trying to influence other countries this way, and one has to do with our self-image - that we're not an empire, that we want independence from an empire, that we're the country of freedom, and so we don't own other countries, but we find this less direct way to tell them what to do.
KINZER: All empires distinguish themselves from all other empires. Each empire wants to think, we do it differently. We're not there for our own greedy purposes. We are there to help the local people. This is a great form of self-deception. But in the long run, these are all interventions aimed at assuring American control over resources and markets. So that runs against the natural anti-imperialist instinct that has been inbred into Latin Americans over many centuries. Whole generations of Venezuelan kids have grown up admiring Simon Bolivar. Why? Because he resisted foreign influence over Venezuela. So this is still a volatile situation.
INSKEEP: You're saying that this is the way the United States has pursued its interests in the Western Hemisphere and sometimes elsewhere. And it sounds like it has often worked in the sense that the United States has prevailed. Are there occasions in which it's gone very wrong?
KINZER: In most occasions, it's gone very wrong. There's an extreme dearth of successful examples of a nation building after violent intervention. When you violently interfere in the affairs of another country, you're doing something like releasing a wheel from the top of a hill. You can let it go, but you have very little control over how it bounces or where it ultimately ends up. So one of the concerns that comes up during all of these interventions is the day after. And that day after can extend for years, as we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So I think these interventions work well at the beginning because of American power. If history would only stop happening, these interventions would all be successful. But unfortunately, history continues to unfold. And we're setting a precedent now that I think terrifies small countries all over the world. And that is, we're returning to the principle that Thucydides pronounced in his book written 25 centuries ago about the Peloponnesian War - the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
INSKEEP: Stephen Kinzer is at Brown University and author of "Overthrow: America's Century Of Regime Change From Hawaii To Iraq." Thanks so much.
KINZER: Good to be with you.
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