The U.S. is no stranger to meddling

Is it ever right to interfere — meddle — in the affairs of another country? Meddling could mean anything from sending in the troops to buying an election. Or, as is alleged in 2016, Russia attempting to assist Donald Trump to the presidency.

Does it depend on who’s doing the meddling and in which country? Is there a moral equivalency among meddlers? In other words, is it legitimate for the U.S. to meddle, as we have done so often, in a Central American banana republic, which is in our backyard, but wrong for Russia to meddle in Ukraine, which is in Russia’s backyard?

Many countries, perhaps most, have done it when they thought they could get away with it. During the Cold War, was it permissible to get rid of a left-wing strongman, as in Chile, for example, but not an unpalatable conservative, as in Spain or Portugal?

Those are tricky and uncomfortable questions to answer. Nobody liked Moammar Gadhafi or Saddam Hussein, but as we were not in a state of war with Libya or Iraq, was it right for the United States and its allies to get rid of both dictators?

One could argue that the world is a better place because we got rid of both men, and that is undoubtedly true in the broadest and most general sense, but I’m not sure that everybody in Libya and Iraq would agree.

Nor everybody in the U.S. or Europe, for that matter.

One of the benefits of the Monroe Doctrine was that it allowed the U.S. a free hand in Latin America under the unacknowledged protection of the British Navy. It seemed only natural that things should go our way in that part of the world. After all, where would Central America be without the American-owned United Fruit Co.?

During the 1930s, a friend of President Franklin Roosevelt, visiting the White House, complained about Antonio Somoza, the Nicaraguan dictator, calling him,an “SOB.” Roosevelt replied, “I know he is, but he’s OUR SOB.” That’s the way things were in those more relaxed days, when the U.S. had a sense of entitlement when it came to Latin America.

What we didn’t have was an intelligence service, because, as Secretary of State Cordell Hull explained, “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Well, yes we did, but not as expertly or voraciously as we do now.

It was really only after World War II that the United States entered the game of worldwide meddling, and that was because the wartime alliance between the Americans, the Russians and the British was no longer sustainable.

By then we had acquired a worldwide intelligence capability, first in the guise of the wartime OSS, or Office of Strategic Services, which worked handin-glove with the British Secret Service, or M16 and the Special Operations Executive. In 1947, the OSS became the Central Intelligence Agency, and the game was on.

Perhaps the first major meddling by the U.S. after World War II was in the Italian elections of 1948, when the U.S. feared that Italy’s large and popular Communist Party could quite legitimately win the national elections, undermining the West’s position in Europe. This could not be allowed to happen.

So, the U.S. covertly poured money and materiel into Italy to help the Christian Democrats, which, as it turned out, won an impressive victory under the leadership of America’s favorite, Alcide di Gasperi.

Then, in 1953, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the U.S. launched a coup in Iran led by Kermit Roosevelt to depose newly elected premier Mohammed Mossadegh, a nationalist who led the takeover of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., which we know today as BP. This could not be allowed to stand.

So the U.S. got rid of Mossadegh and reinstalled the Shah of Iran, a deed for which we are still paying the price. Naturally, we denied any involvement. Naturally, nobody believed us.

In 1954, again under Eisenhower, the CIA deposed leftwing Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz and installed a military dictatorship that would be more amenable to fighting communism and defending the United Fruit Co. These were the days of anti-communist hysteria in the U.S.

Neither the Soviet Union nor China, of course, had clean hands when it came to meddling, but they were also busy trying to consolidate their newly acquired empires. Meddling is an old international business that goes back centuries. Do not expect it to go away anytime soon.

Bill Stewart writes about current affairs from Santa Fe. He is a former U.S. Foreign Service officer and worked as a correspondent for Time magazine.

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