Abstract
The Friendly Tyrants theme has been a part of the American diplomatic experience for over two centuries. For most of that period, the distaste for dealing with nondemocratic regimes reinforced American isolationism and moralism, both a consequence of the belief and practice of American exceptionalism.1 But there were exceptions. With little dissent on account of extreme duress, the newly born American republic opted for realpolitik when the inalienable rights of man allied with the regime of King Louis XVI during the revolutionary war. Later on, in the Caribbean and Central America, where American power and principle met on roughly equal footing, numerous American interventions both before and after the Spanish-American War were debated both in terms of democratic rectitude and concrete security and commercial interests.2 But it took the emergence of the United States as a premier world power with global responsibilities and a global military, political, and economic reach to fully activate the Friendly Tyrants problem. That activation dates only from the end of World War II.
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References
A recent restatement of this position is in James Schlesinger, America at Century’s End (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), especially chapter 2. See also chapter 11 below for a fuller discussion of these themes.
See, for example, the discussion of the Hoover-Stimson policy toward the Caribbean in Henry L. Stimson, On Active Service in War and Peace (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947).
Barbara Tuchman, “If Mao Had Come to Washington: An Essay in Alternatives,” Foreign Affairs, October 1972, pp. 45–46.
See Gregory Treverton, Covert Operations (New York: Basic Books, 1987), pp. 198–201.
Stephen Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 26.
See “Report to the President by Dr. Milton S. Eisenhower on United States-Latin American Relations,” December 27, 1958, NSC Series, Briefing Note Subseries, Box 12, U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (4), Eisenhower Library; see also Milton Eisenhower, The Wine Is Bitter: The United States and Latin America (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963).
See H.W. Brands, Cold Warriors: Eisenhower’s Generation and American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 27–42.
On the absence of a statistical correlation between military aid and dictatorship, see Charles Wolf, Jr., “The Political Effects of Military Programs: Some Indications from Latin America,” Orbis, Winter 1965.
For details, see Hugh Thomas, “Cuba: The United States and Batista,” World Affairs, Spring 1987, pp. 169–175.
According to Tad Szulc, that spring the CIA made contact with Fidel Castro up in the Sierra Maestra. See Fidel: A Critical Portrait (New York: Morrow, 1986), pp. 427–430.
For a detailed discussion of Americans’ perceptions of Castro, see Richard E. Welch, Jr., Response to Revolution: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, 1959–1961 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina Press: University of North Carolina, 1985).
See Tad Szulc, “Castro’s Years as a Secret Communist,” The New York Times Magazine, October 19, 1986.
Argued in Robert Kagan, “Losing in Latin America,” Commentary, November 1988, pp. 45–47.
Howard J. Wiarda, Dictatorship, Development and Disintegration: Politics and Social Change in the Dominican Republic, (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Xerox Microfilm Series, 1975), p. 842.
Ibid. Drawing on Arturo Espaillat, Trujillo: The Last Ceasar (Chicago: Regnery, 1963). Espaillet was a former head of Trujillo’s intelligence service and was at the meeting, along with Murphy and Trujillo (and Cassini!), where this conversation supposedly took place.
See Norman Gall, “How Trujillo Died,” New Republic, April 13, 1963, pp. 19–20.
See Jeremiah O’Leary, The Washington Star, March 11, 1975. Jack Anderson alleged that other attempts were made in 1966, The Washington Post, April 7, 1975. Secretary of State Dean Rusk noted later that “all sorts of efforts… and almost all techniques” were used to bring about change in Haiti, but that “Duvalier was extraordinarily resistant.”
See Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), p. 622, drawing in part on a U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report of November 20, 1975. These citations appear and are derived from chapter 9, below.
One of the fullest accounts is Robert D. Tomasek, “The Haitian-Dominican Republic Controversy of 1963 and the Organization of American States,” Orbis, Spring 1968, pp. 294–313.
John Bartlow Martin, It Seems Like Only Yesterday: Memoirs of Writing, Presidential Politics, and the Diplomatic Life (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1986), pp. 215–246.
Some have argued that the Dominican intervention had much to do with Vietnam, that on the eve of a major U.S. escalation of the war, it was necessary to send a signal of resolve to Hanoi and its supporters. This is possible. Kennedy believed in a link between resolve in Southeast Asia and the situation in Berlin in 1961–62. See William P. Bundy, “The Path to Viet Nam: Ten Decisions,” Orbis, Fall 1967, pp. 654–655.
See Alan H. Luxenberg, “Did Eisenhower Push Castro into the Arms of the Soviets?” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Spring 1988, especially pp. 41–50.
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© 1991 Foreign Policy Research Institute
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Garfinkle, A., Luxenberg, A.H. (1991). The First Friendly Tyrants. In: Pipes, D., Garfinkle, A. (eds) Friendly Tyrants. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21676-5_2
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