Relations between the United States and Argentina can be best described as a cautious embrace punctuated by moments of intense frustration. Although never the center of U.S.–Latin American relations, Argentina has attempted to create a position of influence in the region. As a result, the United States has worked with Argentina and other nations of the Southern Cone—the region of South America that comprises Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, and southern Brazil—on matters of trade and economic development as well as hemispheric security and leadership. While Argentina has attempted to assert its position as one of Latin America’s most developed nations and therefore a regional leader, the equal partnership sought from the United States never materialized for the Southern Cone nation. Instead, competition for markets and U.S. interventionist and unilateral tendencies kept Argentina from attaining the influence and wealth it so desired. At the same time, the United States saw Argentina as an unreliable ally too sensitive to the pull of its volatile domestic politics. The two nations enjoyed moments of cooperation in World War I, the Cold War, and the 1990s, when Argentine leaders could balance this particular external partnership with internal demands. Yet at these times Argentine leaders found themselves walking a fine line as detractors back home saw cooperation with the United States as a violation of their nation’s sovereignty and autonomy. There has always been potential for a productive partnership, but each side’s intransigence and unique concerns limited this relationship’s accomplishments and led to a historical imbalance of power.
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Argentina-US Relations
Jennifer Hoyt
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Caribbean-US Relations
Tyson Reeder
The United States has shared an intricate and turbulent history with Caribbean islands and nations since its inception. In its relations with the Caribbean, the United States has displayed the dueling tendencies of imperialism and anticolonialism that characterized its foreign policy with South America and the rest of the world. For nearly two and a half centuries, the Caribbean has stood at the epicenter of some of the US government’s most controversial and divisive foreign policies. After the American Revolution severed political ties between the United States and the British West Indies, US officials and traders hoped to expand their political and economic influence in the Caribbean. US trade in the Caribbean played an influential role in the events that led to the War of 1812. The Monroe Doctrine provided a blueprint for reconciling imperial ambitions in the Caribbean with anti-imperial sentiment. During the mid-19th century, Americans debated the propriety of annexing Caribbean islands, especially Cuba. After the Spanish-American War of 1898, the US government took an increasingly imperialist approach to its relations with the Caribbean, acquiring some islands as federal territories and augmenting its political, military, and economic influence in others. Contingents of the US population and government disapproved of such imperialistic measures, and beginning in the 1930s the US government softened, but did not relinquish, its influence in the Caribbean. Between the 1950s and the end of the Cold War, US officials wrestled with how to exert influence in the Caribbean in a postcolonial world. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has intervened in Caribbean domestic politics to enhance democracy, continuing its oscillation between democratic and imperial impulses.
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Chemical and Biological Weapons Policy
Thomas I. Faith
Chemical and biological weapons represent two distinct types of munitions that share some common policy implications. While chemical weapons and biological weapons are different in terms of their development, manufacture, use, and the methods necessary to defend against them, they are commonly united in matters of policy as “weapons of mass destruction,” along with nuclear and radiological weapons. Both chemical and biological weapons have the potential to cause mass casualties, require some technical expertise to produce, and can be employed effectively by both nation states and non-state actors. U.S. policies in the early 20th century were informed by preexisting taboos against poison weapons and the American Expeditionary Forces’ experiences during World War I. The United States promoted restrictions in the use of chemical and biological weapons through World War II, but increased research and development work at the outset of the Cold War. In response to domestic and international pressures during the Vietnam War, the United States drastically curtailed its chemical and biological weapons programs and began supporting international arms control efforts such as the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention. U.S. chemical and biological weapons policies significantly influence U.S. policies in the Middle East and the fight against terrorism.
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Chile-US Relations
Patrick William Kelly
The relationship between Chile and the United States pivoted on the intertwined questions of how much political and economic influence Americans would exert over Chile and the degree to which Chileans could chart their own path. Given Chile’s tradition of constitutional government and relative economic development, it established itself as a regional power player in Latin America. Unencumbered by direct US military interventions that marked the history of the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico, Chile was a leader in movements to promote Pan-Americanism, inter-American solidarity, and anti-imperialism. But the advent of the Cold War in the 1940s, and especially after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, brought an increase in bilateral tensions. The United States turned Chile into a “model democracy” for the Alliance for Progress, but frustration over its failures to enact meaningful social and economic reform polarized Chilean society, resulting in the election of Marxist Salvador Allende in 1970. The most contentious period in US-Chilean relations was during the Nixon administration when it worked, alongside anti-Allende Chileans, to destabilize Allende’s government, which the Chilean military overthrew on September 11, 1973. The Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990), while anti-Communist, clashed with the United States over Pinochet’s radicalization of the Cold War and the issue of Chilean human rights abuses. The Reagan administration—which came to power on a platform that reversed the Carter administration’s critique of Chile—reversed course and began to support the return of democracy to Chile, which took place in 1990. Since then, Pinochet’s legacy of neoliberal restructuring of the Chilean economy looms large, overshadowed perhaps only by his unexpected role in fomenting a global culture of human rights that has ended the era of impunity for Latin American dictators.
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Decolonization and US Foreign Relations
Jason C. Parker
The decolonization of the European overseas empires had its intellectual roots early in the modern era, but its culmination occurred during the Cold War that loomed large in post-1945 international history. This culmination thus coincided with the American rise to superpower status and presented the United States with a dilemma. While philosophically sympathetic to the aspirations of anticolonial nationalist movements abroad, the United States’ vastly greater postwar global security burdens made it averse to the instability that decolonization might bring and that communists might exploit. This fear, and the need to share those burdens with European allies who were themselves still colonial landlords, led Washington to proceed cautiously. The three “waves” of the decolonization process—medium-sized in the late 1940s, large in the half-decade around 1960, and small in the mid-1970s—prompted the American use of a variety of tools and techniques to influence how it unfolded.
Prior to independence, this influence was usually channeled through the metropolitan authority then winding down. After independence, Washington continued and often expanded the use of these tools, in most cases on a bilateral basis. In some theaters, such as Korea, Vietnam, and the Congo, through the use of certain of these tools, notably covert espionage or overt military operations, Cold War dynamics enveloped, intensified, and repossessed local decolonization struggles. In most theaters, other tools, such as traditional or public diplomacy or economic or technical development aid, affixed the Cold War into the background as a local transition unfolded. In all cases, the overriding American imperative was to minimize instability and neutralize actors on the ground who could invite communist gains.
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Gender in US Foreign Relations
Heather Stur
Throughout US history, Americans have used ideas about gender to understand power, international relations, military behavior, and the conduct of war. Since Joan Wallach Scott called on scholars in 1986 to consider gender a “useful category of analysis,” historians have looked beyond traditional diplomatic and military sources and approaches to examine cultural sources, the media, and other evidence to try to understand the ideas that Americans have relied on to make sense of US involvement in the world. From casting weak nations as female to assuming that all soldiers are heterosexual males, Americans have deployed mainstream assumptions about men’s and women’s proper behavior to justify US diplomatic and military interventions in the world. State Department pamphlets describing newly independent countries in the 1950s and 1960s featured gendered imagery like the picture of a young Vietnamese woman on a bicycle that was meant to symbolize South Vietnam, a young nation in need of American guidance. Language in news reports and government cables, as well as film representations of international affairs and war, expressed gendered dichotomies such as protector and protected, home front and battlefront, strong and weak leadership, and stable and rogue states. These and other episodes illustrate how thoroughly gender shaped important dimensions about the character and the making of US foreign policy and historians’ examinations of diplomatic and military history.
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Indigenous Nations and US Foreign Relations
Jon Parmenter
The United States has engaged with Indigenous nations on a government-to-government basis via federal treaties representing substantial international commitments since the origins of the republic. The first treaties sent to the Senate for ratification under the Constitution of 1789 were treaties with Indigenous nations. Treaties with Indigenous nations provided the means by which approximately one billion acres of land entered the national domain of the United States prior to 1900, at an average price of seventy-five cents per acre – the United States confiscated or claimed another billion acres of Indigenous land without compensation. Despite subsequent efforts of American federal authorities to alter these arrangements, the weight of evidence indicates that the relationship remains primarily one of a nation-to-nation association. Integration of the history of federal relations with Indigenous nations with American foreign relations history sheds important new light on the fundamental linkages between these seemingly distinct state practices from the beginnings of the American republic.
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International Terrorism and the United States
Mary S. Barton and David M. Wight
The US government’s perception of and response to international terrorism has undergone momentous shifts since first focusing on the issue in the early 20th century. The global rise of anarchist and communist violence provided the impetus for the first major US government programs aimed at combating international terrorism: restrictive immigration policies targeting perceived radicals. By the 1920s, the State Department emerged as the primary government agency crafting US responses to international terrorism, generally combating communist terrorism through diplomacy and information-sharing partnerships with foreign governments. The 1979 Iranian hostage crisis marked the beginning of two key shifts in US antiterrorism policy: a heightened focus on combating Islamist terrorism and a willingness to deploy military force to this end. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, led US officials to conceptualize international terrorism as a high-level national security problem, leading to US military invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, a broader use of special forces, and unprecedented intelligence-gathering operations.
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Ireland-US Relations
Sophie Cooper
Irish and American histories are intertwined as a result of migration, mercantile and economic connections, and diplomatic pressures from governments and nonstate actors. The two fledgling nations were brought together by their shared histories of British colonialism, but America’s growth as an imperial power complicated any natural allegiances that were invoked across the centuries. Since the beginnings of that relationship in 1607 with the arrival of Irish migrants in America (both voluntary and forced) and the building of a transatlantic linen trade, the meaning of “Irish” has fluctuated in America, mirroring changes in both migrant patterns and international politics. The 19th century saw Ireland enter into Anglo-American diplomacy on both sides of the Atlantic, while the 20th century saw Ireland emerge from Britain’s shadow with the establishment of separate diplomatic connections between the United States and Ireland. American recognition of the newly independent Irish Free State was vital for Irish politicians on the world stage; however the Free State’s increasingly isolationist policies during the 1930s to 1950s alienated its American allies. The final decade of the century, however, brought America and Ireland (including both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland) closer than ever before. Throughout their histories, the Irish diasporas—both Protestant and Catholic—in America have played vital roles as pressure groups and fundraisers. The history of American–Irish relations therefore brings together governmental and nonstate organizations and unites political, diplomatic, social, cultural, and economic histories which are still relevant today.
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The Korean Peninsula and US Foreign Relations
David P. Fields
The United States and the Kingdom of Joseon (Korea) established formal diplomatic relations after signing a “Treaty of Peace, Commerce, Amity, and Navigation” in 1882. Relations between the two states were not close and the United States closed its legation in 1905 following the Japanese annexation of Korea subsequent to the Russo-Japanese War. No formal relations existed for the following forty-four years, but American interest in Korea grew following the 1907 Pyongyang Revival and the rapid growth of Christianity there. Activists in the Korean Independence movement kept the issue of Korea alive in the United States, especially during World War I and World War II, and pressured the American government to support the re-emergence of an independent Korea. Their activism, as well as a distrust of the Soviet Union, was among the factors that spurred the United States to suggest the joint occupation of the Korean peninsula in 1945, which subsequently led to the creation of the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the American zone and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the Soviet zone. The United States withdrew from the ROK in 1948 only to return in 1950 to thwart the DPRK’s attempt to reunite the peninsula by force during the Korean War. The war ended in stalemate, with an armistice agreement in 1953. In the same year the United States and the ROK signed a military alliance and American forces have remained on the peninsula ever since. While the United States has enjoyed close political and security relations with the ROK, formal diplomatic relations have never been established between the United States and the DPRK, and the relationship between the two has been marked by increasing tensions over the latter’s nuclear program since the early 1990s.
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Neutrality/Nonalignment and the United States
Robert Rakove
For almost a century and a half, successive American governments adopted a general policy of neutrality on the world stage, eschewing involvement in European conflicts and, after the Quasi War with France, alliances with European powers. Neutrality, enshrined as a core principle of American foreign relations by the outgoing President George Washington in 1796, remained such for more than a century.
Finally, in the 20th century, the United States emerged as a world power and a belligerent in the two world wars and the Cold War. This article explores the modern conflict between traditional American attitudes toward neutrality and the global agenda embraced by successive U.S. governments, beginning with entry in the First World War. With the United States immersed in these titanic struggles, the traditional U.S. support for neutrality eroded considerably. During the First World War, the United States showed some sympathy for the predicaments of the remaining neutral powers. In the Second World War it applied considerable pressure to those states still trading with Germany. During the Cold War, the United States was sometimes impatient with the choices of states to remain uncommitted in the global struggle, while at times it showed understanding for neutrality and pursued constructive relations with neutral states. The wide varieties of neutrality in each of these conflicts complicated the choices of U.S. policy makers. Americans remained torn between memory of their own long history of neutrality and a capacity to understand its potential value, on one hand, and a predilection to approach conflicts as moral struggles, on the other.
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The Role of Congress in the History of US Foreign Relations
Clay Silver Katsky
While presidents have historically been the driving force behind foreign policy decision-making, Congress has used its constitutional authority to influence the process. The nation’s founders designed a system of checks and balances aimed at establishing a degree of equilibrium in foreign affairs powers. Though the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and the country’s chief diplomat, Congress holds responsibility for declaring war and can also exert influence over foreign relations through its powers over taxation and appropriation, while the Senate possesses authority to approve or reject international agreements. This separation of powers compels the executive branch to work with Congress to achieve foreign policy goals, but it also sets up conflict over what policies best serve national interests and the appropriate balance between executive and legislative authority. Since the founding of the Republic, presidential power over foreign relations has accreted in fits and starts at the legislature’s expense. When core American interests have come under threat, legislators have undermined or surrendered their power by accepting presidents’ claims that defense of national interests required strong executive action. This trend peaked during the Cold War, when invocations of national security enabled the executive to amass unprecedented control over America’s foreign affairs.
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Russia-US Foreign Relations, 1917–1991
Margaret Peacock
In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville argued in Democracy in America that there were “two great nations in the world.” They had started from different historical points but seemed to be heading in the same direction. As expanding empires, they faced the challenges of defeating nature and constructing a civilization for the modern era. Although they adhered to different governmental systems, “each of them,” de Tocqueville declared, “seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”
De Tocqueville’s words were prophetic. In the 19th century, Russian and American intellectuals and diplomats struggled to understand the roles that their countries should play in the new era of globalization and industrialization. Despite their differing understandings of how development should happen, both sides believed in their nation’s vital role in guiding the rest of the world. American adherents of liberal developmentalism often argued that a free flow of enterprise, trade, investment, information, and culture was the key to future growth. They held that the primary obligation of American foreign policy was to defend that freedom by pursuing an “open door” policy and free access to markets. They believed that the American model would work for everyone and that the United States had an obligation to share its system with the old and underdeveloped nations around it.
A similar sense of mission developed in Russia. Russian diplomats had for centuries struggled to establish defensive buffers around the periphery of their empire. They had linked economic development to national security, and they had argued that their geographic expansion represented a “unification” of peoples as opposed to a conquering of them. In the 19th century, after the Napoleonic Wars and the failed Decembrist Revolution, tsarist policymakers fought to defend autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationalism from domestic and international critics. As in the United States, Imperial and later Soviet leaders envisioned themselves as the emissaries of the Enlightenment to the backward East and as protectors of tradition and order for the chaotic and revolutionary West.
These visions of order clashed in the 20th century as the Soviet Union and the United States became superpowers. Conflicts began early, with the American intervention in the 1918–1921 Russian civil war. Tensions that had previously been based on differing geographic and strategic interests then assumed an ideological valence, as the fight between East and West became a struggle between the political economies of communism and capitalism. Foreign relations between the two countries experienced boom and bust cycles that took the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust and yet maintained a strategic balance that precluded the outbreak of global war for fifty years. This article will examine how that relationship evolved and how it shaped the modern world.
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Saudi Arabia-US Relations
Victor McFarland
The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia has shaped the history of both countries. Soon after the Saudi kingdom was founded in 1932, American geologists discovered enormous oil reserves near the Persian Gulf. Oil-driven development transformed Saudi society. Many Americans came to work in Saudi Arabia, while thousands of Saudis studied and traveled in the United States. During the mid-20th century, the American-owned oil company Aramco and the US government worked to strengthen the Saudi regime and empower conservative forces in the kingdom—not only to protect American oil interests, but also to suppress nationalist and leftist movements in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East. The partnership was complicated by disagreement over Israel, triggering an Arab oil embargo against the United States in 1973–1974. During the 1970s, Saudi Arabia became the world’s largest oil exporter, nationalized Aramco, and benefited from surging oil prices. In partnership with the United States, it used its new wealth at home to launch a huge economic development program, and abroad to subsidize political allies like the Afghan mujahideen. The United States led a massive military operation to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1990–1991, protecting the Saudi regime but angering Saudis who opposed their government’s close relationship with the United States. One result was the rise of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network and the 9/11 attacks, carried out by a largely Saudi group of hijackers. Despite public opposition on both sides, after 2001 the United States and Saudi Arabia continued their commercial relationship and their political partnership, originally directed against the Soviet Union and Nasser’s Egypt, and later increasingly aimed at Iran.
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Social Science and US Foreign Affairs
Joy Rohde
Since the social sciences began to emerge as scholarly disciplines in the last quarter of the 19th century, they have frequently offered authoritative intellectual frameworks that have justified, and even shaped, a variety of U.S. foreign policy efforts. They played an important role in U.S. imperial expansion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scholars devised racialized theories of social evolution that legitimated the confinement and assimilation of Native Americans and endorsed civilizing schemes in the Philippines, Cuba, and elsewhere. As attention shifted to Europe during and after World War I, social scientists working at the behest of Woodrow Wilson attempted to engineer a “scientific peace” at Versailles. The desire to render global politics the domain of objective, neutral experts intensified during World War II and the Cold War. After 1945, the social sciences became increasingly central players in foreign affairs, offering intellectual frameworks—like modernization theory—and bureaucratic tools—like systems analysis—that shaped U.S. interventions in developing nations, guided nuclear strategy, and justified the increasing use of the U.S. military around the world.
Throughout these eras, social scientists often reinforced American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States stands at the pinnacle of social and political development, and as such has a duty to spread liberty and democracy around the globe. The scholarly embrace of conventional political values was not the result of state coercion or financial co-optation; by and large social scientists and policymakers shared common American values. But other social scientists used their knowledge and intellectual authority to critique American foreign policy. The history of the relationship between social science and foreign relations offers important insights into the changing politics and ethics of expertise in American public policy.
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Sports and US Foreign Relations
Heather L. Dichter
Against the long-standing claim that sport and politics should remain separate, the United States has long included sport within its broader foreign relations efforts. During the second half of the 19th century, American businessmen, members of the military, and missionaries all taught local populations how to play sports like baseball and basketball because they viewed their actions as part of the “civilizing mission” of Americans abroad.
With the onset of the Cold War, the government began incorporating sport into its formal programs to promote the United States overseas, using athletes as a large part of its public diplomacy efforts. Federal programs related to physical education were implemented to improve American health in the interest of fighting the Soviet Union. Sport thus served a role in the global competition of the Cold War as well as contributing to building bridges with other states. In the 21st century, the government formalized the use of sport within public diplomacy efforts with the establishment of a bureaucracy focused solely on sport.
Sport also provided an avenue to spread American culture overseas as a model for organizing events and the approach to marketing and sponsorship. Both the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games and Nike’s contract with basketball player Michael Jordan established new forms of cultural capitalism. American professional teams have capitalized on their global interest by holding exhibition and regular-season games overseas, bringing an American sport experience to international audiences while simultaneously expanding marketing opportunities.
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The American Labor Movement and the Establishment of Israel
Adam Howard
A remarkably large number of nonstate actors played important and often unheralded roles in the creation of the state of Israel. The American labor movement was one such actor, assisting the Jewish community in Palestine to develop a political and social infrastructure in the “Yishuv” years before statehood, and then continuing to do so afterward. This movement, consisting of various labor federations, unions, and fraternal orders, aided the Zionist cause through a unique combination of financial and political resources.
American labor organizations, especially those in the Jewish labor movement, helped lay the groundwork for the formation of a Jewish state by nurturing a labor movement in Palestine and influencing the US policymaking apparatus. They aided this process through land purchases for Jewish worker cooperatives in Palestine, the construction of trade schools and cultural centers there, and massive economic aid to the Histadrut, the General Federation of Jewish Workers in Palestine. American labor organizations also lobbied congressional allies, the White House, and local officials to generate policies assisting the Yishuv. They even pressured the British government during its mandate over Palestine and lobbied United Nations (UN) member states to vote for the partition of Palestine in 1947 and Israel’s recognition in 1948.
Jewish labor leadership within the American garment industry played the key role in mobilizing the larger labor movement to support a Jewish state. Initially, however, most Jewish labor leaders did not support this effort because many descended from the “Bund” or General Jewish Workers’ Union of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, a Jewish socialist party founded in 1897. Like any other nationalist movement, Bundists viewed Zionism as a diversion of the labor movement’s fight against capitalism. Instead, Bundists emphasized Jewish culture as a vehicle to spread socialism to the Jewish masses. Yet, in time, two practical concerns developed that would move Bundists to embrace assistance to the Yishuv and, ultimately, to the state of Israel. First, finding Jewish refugees a haven from persecution and, second, a commitment to assisting a burgeoning trade union movement in Palestine.
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U.S.–Nigerian Relations
Brian McNeil
The United States and Nigeria have a long history, stretching back to the transatlantic slave trade in the 18th century and continuing today through economic and security partnerships. While the relationship has evolved over time and both countries have helped to shape each other’s histories in important ways, there remains a tension between hope and reality in which both sides struggle to live up to the expectations set for themselves and for each other. The United States looks to Nigeria to be the model of progress and stability in Africa that the West African state wants to become; Nigeria looks to American support for its development and security needs despite the United States continuously coming up short. There have been many strains in the relationship, and the United States and Nigeria have continued to ebb and flow between cooperation and conflict. Whatever friction there might be, the relationship between the United States and Nigeria is important to analyze because it offers a window to understanding trends and broad currents in international history such as decolonization, humanitarianism, energy politics, and terrorism.
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The United Kingdom and the United States: The Special Relationship
Ted R. Bromund
The Special Relationship is a term used to describe the close relations between the United States and the United Kingdom. It applies particularly to the governmental realms of foreign, defense, security, and intelligence policy, but it also captures a broader sense that both public and private relations between the United States and Britain are particularly deep and close. The Special Relationship is thus a term for a reality that came into being over time as the result of political leadership as well as ideas and events outside the formal arena of politics.
After the political break of the American Revolution and in spite of sporadic cooperation in the 19th century, it was not until the Great Rapprochement of the 1890s that the idea that Britain and the United States had a special kind of relationship took hold. This decade, in turn, created the basis for the Special Relationship, a term first used by Winston Churchill in 1944. Churchill did the most to build the relationship, convinced as he was that close friendship between Britain and the United States was the cornerstone of world peace and prosperity. During and after the Second World War, many others on both sides of the Atlantic came to agree with Churchill.
The post-1945 era witnessed a flowering of the relationship, which was cemented—not without many controversies and crises—by the emerging Cold War against the Soviet Union. After the end of the Cold War in 1989, the relationship remained close, though it was severely tested by further security crises, Britain’s declining defense spending, the evolving implications of Britain’s membership in the European Union, the relative decline of Europe, and an increasing U.S. interest in Asia. Yet on many public and private levels, relations between the United States and Britain continue to be particularly deep, and thus the Special Relationship endures.
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U.S.-Bolivia Relations
James F. Siekmeier
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, U.S. officials often viewed Bolivia as both a potential “test case” for U.S. economic foreign policy and a place where Washington’s broad visions for Latin America might be implemented relatively easily. After World War II, Washington leaders sought to show both Latin America and the nonindustrialized world that a relatively open economy could produce significant economic wealth for Bolivia’s working and middle classes, thus giving the United States a significant victory in the Cold War. Washington sought a Bolivia widely open to U.S. influence, and Bolivia often seemed an especially pliable country. In order to achieve their goals in Bolivia, U.S. leaders dispensed a large amount of economic assistance to Bolivia in the 1950s—a remarkable development in two senses. First, the U.S. government, generally loath to aid Third World nations, gave this assistance to a revolutionary regime. Second, the U.S. aid program for Bolivia proved to be a precursor to the Alliance for Progress, the massive aid program for Latin America in the 1960s that comprised the largest U.S. economic aid program in the Third World. Although U.S. leaders achieved their goal of a relatively stable, noncommunist Bolivia, the decision in the late 1950s to significantly increase U.S. military assistance to Bolivia’s relatively small military emboldened that military, which staged a coup in 1964, snuffing out democracy for nearly two decades. The country’s long history of dependency in both export markets and public- and private-sector capital investment led Washington leaders to think that dependency would translate into leverage over Bolivian policy. However, the historical record is mixed in this regard. Some Bolivian governments have accommodated U.S. demands; others have successfully resisted them.
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