Reddit reviews The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power

Its nonsense. It was used by Anti Semitic America First Movements in the 1930s to Justify Non Interventionism in World War 2 and Isolationism.

>In many of the countries the United States occupied, holding fair elections became a top priority, because once a democratically elected government was installed, the Americans felt they could withdraw. In 1925 the Coolidge administration refused to recognize the results of a stolen election in Nicaragua and the following year sent in the Marines, even though the strongman who had stuffed the ballot boxes, Gen. Emiliano Chamorro Vargas, was ardently pro-American. The United States went on to administer two elections in Nicaragua, in 1928 and 1932, that even the losers acknowledged were the fairest in the country’s history. “The interventions by U.S. Marines in Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere in those years,” writes the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, “often bore striking resemblances to the interventions by Federal marshals in the conduct of elections in the American South in the 1960s: registering voters, protecting against electoral violence, ensuring a free vote and an honest count.”

>The interventions in Central America and the Caribbean have become infamous as “gunboat diplomacy” and as “banana wars” undertaken at the behest of powerful Wall Street interests. Smedley Butler helped solidify this myth when, after his retirement from the Marine Corps, he became an ardent isolationist and antiimperialist. He spent the 1930s denouncing his own career, claiming he had been “a racketeer for capitalism” and a “highclass muscle man for Big Business.”

>In fact, in the early years of the twentieth century, the United States was least likely to intervene in those nations (such as Argentina and Costa Rica) where American investors held the biggest stakes. The longest occupations were undertaken in precisely those countries —Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic—where the United States had the smallest economic stakes. Moreover, two of the most interventionist Presidents in U.S. history, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, were united in their contempt for what TR called “malefactors of great wealth.” Wilson was probably the most imperialist President of all, and his interventions had a decidedly idealistic tinge. His goal, as he proclaimed at the start of his administration, was “to teach the South American republics to elect good men.”

>How well did the United States achieve this aim? The record is mixed. Its greatest success (outside those territories that remain under the Stars and Stripes to this day) was in the Philippines, which was (no coincidence) the site of one of its longest occupations. Among the institutions Americans bequeathed to the Filipinos were public schools, a free press, an independent judiciary, a modern bureaucracy, democratic government, and separation of church and state. Unlike the Dutch in the East Indies, the British in Malaya, or the French in Indochina, the Americans left virtually no legacy of economic exploitation; Congress was so concerned about protecting the Filipinos that it barred large landholdings by American individuals or corporations. The U.S. legacy was also a lasting one: The Philippines have been for the most part free and democratic save for the 1972–86 period, when Ferdinand Marcos ruled by fiat. That’s more than most other Asian countries can say.

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The U.S. legacy in the Caribbean and Central America was more fleeting. It is not true, as some critics later charged, that the United States deliberately installed dictators such as Duvalier, Batista, and Somoza. The governments left in power by American troops were usually democratic and decent. But they were also too weak to survive on their own. In the past the United States might have intervened to support democratically elected regimes. In the 1930s, however, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt renounced the interventionist policies of his predecessors, stretching back to the days of his cousin Theodore and beyond. Henceforth, FDR said, U.S. relations with Latin America would be governed by the Good Neighbor policy, which meant in essence that Washington would work with whoever came to power, no matter how.

The Savage Wars of Peace by Max Boot is also a good read for early US Wars as well.

>A myth has flourished around these interventions—that they were conducted, as Smedley Butler later claimed, at the behest of Wall Street banks and banana companies. But in fact, as I argue in Chapters 6–7 and 10, the desire to protect American economic interests was only one of the motives behind the Banana Wars, and often not the most important one. Strategic and, yes, moral concerns played a vital role, especially in the actions of Woodrow Wilson,who vowed "to teach the South American republics to elect good men." "The interventions by U.S. Marines in Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere in those years," writes the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, "often bore striking resemblances to the interventions by Federal marshals in the conduct of elections in the American South in the 1960s: registering voters, protecting against electoral violence, ensuring a free vote and an honest count.

I recommend reading the book to get a good understanding of American Interventions in the Banana Wars unlike the New Left historians of the 1960s version of history.

The best example might be from Haiti.

Read Max Boot's account in "The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power" to learn how the Haitians were enabled to enforce their laws and so terminate corruption in all branches within a short time.

That was then and this is now, that model no longer works.

I haven't read it, but I'd imagine that Savage Wars of Peace would also be good. Max discusses small-scale conflicts in US History that are usually paved over by Chomskyites as being imperialist: https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Wars-Peace-Small-American/dp/0465064930

I'd imagine it's probably a lot like his article about liberal imperialism here: https://www.americanheritage.com/content/liberal-imperialism

https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Wars-Peace-Small-American/dp/0465064930

https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Wars-Peace-Small-American/dp/0465064930