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Covert Regime Change: America's Secret Cold War

Article in Journal of American History · December 2019

DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jaz637

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818 The Journal of American History
e­xceptionalism and project images to dazzle
the rest of the world” (p. 229).
Amy Bass
Manhattanville College
Purchase, New York
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jaz635
Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the
British Superpower, 1945–1957. By Derek Lee-
baert. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
2018. 612 pp. $35.00.)
Derek Leebaert has produced a lively, schol-
arly, and generally persuasive reinterpretation
of Anglo-American international history after
1945. He does not see an abrupt and inevitable
transfer of global sway from London to Wash-
ington occurring during the period. Rather,
he suggests that British elites remained com-
mitted to their policies of global reach. Their
American equivalents were jittery and un-
certain about assuming new responsibilities.
Leebaert musters extensive archival evidence.
A July 1950 National Security Council docu-
ment (nsc 75) concluded, in Leebaert’s words,
that “the British Empire and Commonwealth
would stay much as it had been, covering the
globe with its nearly one million men under
arms and who-knew-what in reserve” (p.
234). The doctrine of militarized global con-
tainment, as articulated a couple of months
earlier in another National Security Council
document (nsc 68), was thus severely quali-
fied. According to Leebaert, neither the Tru-
man administration nor the first Eisenhower
administration seriously questioned Britain’s
global commitment. Only in December
1956—the year of the Suez crisis, President
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s reelection, and the
Soviet invasion of Hungary—did U.S. lead-
ers commit fully to what Richard M. Nixon
called “the foreign policy leadership of the
world” (p. 4). Only the October 1957 Sputnik
launch, in Leebaert’s view, effectively put an
end to the period of U.S. uncertainty about
assuming its global burden.
Grand Improvisation contains a plethora
of first-rate scholarship. It reminds us that, in
international history, little is inevitable. Oc-
casionally, however, Leebaert does push his
December 2019
case too enthusiastically. He recognizes the
economic damage sustained by Britain dur-
ing World War II. However, following the
line argued by British foreign secretary Ernest
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Bevin, Leebaert seems to believe that “bluff”
and the deference of other powers compensat-
ed for economic weakness (p. 29). (The dis-
cussions of Bevin’s handling of Anglo-Ameri-
can relations, especially in the context of aid
to Greece in 1947 and of policy toward Ber-
lin in 1948, are among the best in the book.)
Students of international relations theory, par-
ticularly of neoclassical realism, will recognize
the argument that bluff, and even elite percep-
tions, can postpone rather than entirely derail
international power transitions. Leebaert fur-
ther argues, perhaps too forcibly, that Amer-
ica lacked any coherent grand strategy in the
period immediately following World War II.
Such arguments lead to a rather drastic mar-
ginalization of George F. Kennan and Paul
­Nitze. We are told in a footnote that, by 1952,
“‘containment’ had come to mean anything to
anyone” (p. 559n1). The “sequence of Truman
Doctrine–Marshall Plan–Containment was
just shy of winging it” (p. 102). Grand strat-
egy almost inevitably appears more coherent in
retrospect than it did to political leaders who
were preoccupied with crisis management, bu-
reaucratic rivalries, and the domestic overspill
from foreign policy decisions. This truth does
not mean that grand strategy did not exist.
Alongside Leebaert’s excellent book, I would
still recommend that students read Melvin P.
Leffler’s A Preponderance of Power: National Se-
curity, the Truman Administration, and the Cold
War (1992).
John Dumbrell, Emeritus
Durham University
Durham, England
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jaz636
Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold
War. By Lindsey A. O’Rourke. (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2018. xvi, 312 pp.
$39.95.)
In this well-researched and clearly written
book, Lindsay A. O’Rourke, a professor of
political science at Boston College, vigorously
 Book Reviews
argues that during the Cold War U.S. officials
repeatedly launched covert interventions in
foreign countries, even though most of the
operations failed to effect regime changes, be-
cause the officials saw them as cheap ways to
enhance U.S. security and power. Drawing on
a wide reading in secondary sources supple-
mented by research at the National Archives
and presidential libraries, O’Rourke analyzes
sixty-four covert interventions from 1947 to
1989. After examining the causes, conduct,
and consequences of the covert actions in
chapters 3–5, O’Rourke turns to case studies
of U.S. actions in Eastern Europe, Vietnam,
and the Dominican Republic. She finds that
more than 60 percent (39 of 64) of the efforts
failed and most did not remain secret; yet pol-
icy makers continued to resort to covert ac-
tions and to overestimate their ability to keep
the U.S. role hidden.
O’Rourke insists that realpolitik, not ideol-
ogy, drove U.S. actions. She emphasizes that
U.S. officials supported authoritarian forces in
44 of the 64 cases and only promoted democ-
racy when it seemed likely to serve U.S. inter-
ests. She also cites the U.S. backing of Josip
Broz Tito, the communist leader of Yugoslavia,
and of neofascist forces in Eastern Europe as
evidence that ideology did not spur U.S. co-
vert actions. The argument is blinkered. It ig-
nores long-term ideological influences on key
figures such as George F. Kennan, who had felt
impelled for decades before the late 1940s to
follow the example of his eponym, the great
crusader for a “free Russia.” It discounts how
many U.S. officials viewed the Cold War as an
ideological contest. And it disregards how an-
ticommunist ideology inclined many Ameri-
cans to sympathize with fascists such as Benito
Mussolini and Francisco Franco long before
the post-1945 Cold War.
O’Rourke posits that U.S. policy mak-
ers are rational actors who make decisions
about interventions based on consideration
of risks and rewards. That leaves one to wish
for a more complete explanation of why poli-
cy makers have continued to resort to actions
that have repeatedly brought few rewards and
higher-than-expected costs.
O’Rourke recognizes that U.S. covert ac-
tion for regime change did not begin or end
with the Cold War. She briefly notes, for exam-
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ple, that Woodrow Wilson covertly supported
anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War.
The Bolsheviks upset Wilson’s hopes for de-
mocracy in Russia and Bolshevism posed an
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ideological menace, but the very weak Soviet
state did not threaten U.S. security and Wil-
son explicitly rejected any military justification
for intervention. O’Rourke does not grapple
with the implications of such facts for her ar-
gument that covert regime change operations
have been driven by concerns about security
rather than ideology or economic interests.
A brief epilogue about covert regime
change after the Cold War, based mainly on
newspaper articles, is disappointingly shallow,
and there is no bibliography. Despite those
shortcomings, Covert Regime Change is a well-
executed, valuable study.
David S. Foglesong
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jaz637
The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The
Untold History. By Monica Kim. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2019. xiv, 435 pp.
$35.00.)
In this thought-provoking book, Monica
Kim uses an iconic Korean War figure—the
prisoner of war (pow)—to illuminate Cold
War decolonization in Asia. The Interrogation
Rooms of the Korean War argues that the “for-
gotten war” was important for its escalation
not only of Cold War politico-military ten-
sions but also lesser-known sociocultural ten-
sions, especially among Koreans, for whom
the war climaxed a long, agonizing era of co-
lonialism and anticolonialism.
Broadly, Kim argues that the legal and
­sociocultural battles waged by United Nations
(un) representatives and Communist dele-
gates over the pow’s voluntary repatriation—
a new humanitarian concept that broke with
established law—emphasize modern warfare’s
“productive capabilities” over “its destructive
ones” (p. 354, emphasis in original). Within
the conflict’s turbulent social context, the pow
was not only the chief diplomatic obstacle
to a truce agreement but also a foundational