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" 'Blowback,' as many 'Nation' readers are aware, was a term introduced into popular circulation by the late political scientist Chalmers Johnson, an old Cold Warrior turned dissident. "
Greg Grandin
Political
Late
Cold
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" The CIA's always-useful World Fact book says that a staggering 6.3 million Colombians have been internally displaced (IDP) since 1985, with 'about 300,000 new IDPs each year since 2000,' the year Bill Clinton enacted Plan Colombia. Added up, that's 2.4 million people during Clinton's eight-year presidency. "
Greg Grandin
People
Book
Plan
" Such is the nature of the 'unity government' Clinton helped institutionalize. In her book, 'Hard Choices,' Clinton holds up her Honduran settlement as a proud example of her trademark clear-eyed, 'pragmatic' foreign policy approach. Berta Caceres gave her life to fight that government. "
Greg Grandin
Fight
Book
Unity
" Wilson won re-election in 1916, his campaign running on the slogan, 'He kept us out of war.' But he could then betray his anti-war supporters knowing that a rising political coalition - made up, in part, of men looking to redeem a lost war by finding new wars to fight - had his back. "
Greg Grandin
New
Men
Looking
" The story of how Chile, in the decades after its 1973 coup and death of democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, became one of the most neoliberal societies on the planet is well known. "
Greg Grandin
Planet
Death
President
" Honduras in 2009 and Paraguay in 2012 were low-hanging fruit, small countries with outsized oligarchies, where mild reformers were easily dispatched. "
Greg Grandin
Countries
Where
Small
" In its original version, the FTAA was meant to be a special carve-out for Washington and Wall Street as global 'free trade' advanced under the umbrella of the Doha round of the WTO. "
Greg Grandin
Wall
Street
Special
" There was a brief moment, after Haiti's 2010 earthquake, when even Bill Clinton recognized what had been done to Haiti in the name of 'free trade': the destruction of local markets and rice production. "
Greg Grandin
Moment
Free
Done
" Beyond institutional amnesia, a rejection of causal analysis is the existential rock on which American Exceptionalism sits. The United States unique sense of itself depends on an ambiguous relationship to the past. History is affirmed, since it is America's unprecedented historical success that justifies the exceptionalism. "
Greg Grandin
History
Past
Relationship
" Is Donald Trump a fascist? It's an interesting question that has generated insightful commentary over the past few months, with the best answers situating Trumpian illiberalism within America's long history of racial oppression, slavery, Jim Crow apartheid, and the ongoing backlash to the loss of white privilege. "
Greg Grandin
Best
Past
Loss
" Like Hillary Clinton in the United States, Kuczynski is a prototypical member of the trans-American governing class, with deep roots in both the private and public sector and its revolving-door relationship between Washington think tanks, the State Department, and high-level Latin American ministries. "
Greg Grandin
Class
Think
Roots
" Migrants don't come to the United States because, as Ambassador Aponte argued in her press conference, of 'lies' told by smugglers that, once here, you can't get deported. They come because their countries have been destroyed by U.S. policy. "
Greg Grandin
Lies
Conference
Her
" Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, heavy-handedly provoked South American governments on any number of issues, including a rush to endorse the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, which only worked to steel resistance and build solidarity. "
Greg Grandin
Build
American
Steel
" If all Henry Kissinger contributed to the Middle East were a regional arms race, petrodollar addiction, Iranian radicalization, and the Tehran-Riyadh conflict, it would be bad enough. His legacy, however, is far worse than that: He has to answer for his role in the rise of political Islam. "
Greg Grandin
Rise
Race
Political
" Starting in the early 1800s, Southerners in the United States began to defend slavery as their 'peculiar institution,' and northerners didn't mind, since the phrase suggested that chattel bondage was quarantined from the rest of the nation: that it was, or soon would be, a relic of its past and would not define its future. "
Greg Grandin
Early
Rest
Slavery
" Most critical histories of U.S. involvement in Iran rightly began with the joint British-U.S. coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, which installed Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. But it was Kissinger who, in 1972, greatly deepened the relationship between Washington and Tehran. "
Greg Grandin
Washington
Involvement
Relationship
" Kissinger's unusually high body count and singular moral imperiousness has the effect, among his critics, of obscuring his didactic utility. An outsized personality who has committed outsized mayhem, Kissinger eclipses his own context. Yet, as animals were to the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Kissinger is good to think with. "
Greg Grandin
Personality
Body
Good
" The removal of the British after the American Revolution opened the floodgates of paramilitary ranger power. For instance, in 1786, ranger units, including one that included Daniel Boone, attacked a number of friendly Shawnee towns along the Mad River. "
Greg Grandin
Mad
River
Revolution
" In 1954, Guatemala's deposed president, the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz, was forced to strip down to his underwear and photographed before being allowed to leave the country. "
Greg Grandin
Before
Down
Leave
" At issue when professional sports teams take the name of Native Americans is the problem of mimicry: having appropriated the land and wealth of America's vanquished peoples, settler culture then appropriates the supposed values and spirit of the vanquished as well. "
Greg Grandin
Name
Culture
Sports
" By June 1974, Treasury Secretary George Shultz was already suggesting that rising oil prices could result in a 'highly advantageous mutual bargain' between the United States and petroleum-producing countries in the Middle East. "
Greg Grandin
Result
United States
June
" The idea that Hillary Clinton wants to do to Central America what her husband did to Colombia is troubling. "
Greg Grandin
Husband
Her
America
" Brazil imported more enslaved Africans than any other American nation and was the last country in the hemisphere to abolish the institution, in 1888. "
Greg Grandin
Country
Nation
More
" In the 1960s, as a rising defense intellectual, Kissinger was a Nelson Rockefeller man, firmly entrenched in the center-right establishment. When he attended the infamous 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he was horrified by Goldwater supporters, whom he likened to fascists. "
Greg Grandin
Defense
Republican
Man
" As first lady, Hillary Clinton spent the early months of her husband's administration drafting healthcare-reform legislation, only to see it put on the back burner by the North American Free Trade Agreement. "
Greg Grandin
American
Lady
Husband
" America's militarized brand of malignant exceptionalism is founded on the idea that the United States transcends history. "
Greg Grandin
Brand
America
History
" Endorsing Ronald Reagan in 1980, Kissinger threw in with America's new militarists, who would jump-start a revived Cold War and drive to retake the Third World. "
Greg Grandin
World
Drive
New
" Defenders of Wilson are correct to beg for context when considering his legacy. But it is they who ignore the context: the role Wilson played in using war, including Haiti's racist counterinsurgency, to nationalize white supremacy, militarism, and Christian evangelism. "
Greg Grandin
Legacy
War
White
" President George H. W. Bush soon launched Operation Desert Shield, sending an enormous contingent of troops to Saudi Arabia. But once there, what exactly were they to do? Contain Iraq? Attack and liberate Kuwait? Drive on to Baghdad and depose Saddam? There was no clear consensus among foreign policy advisers or analysts. "
Greg Grandin
Policy
Attack
Desert
" Without U.S. input, the countries of South America joined forces in 2008 to shut down a coup attempt in Bolivia and prevented a war between Ecuador and Colombia. "
Greg Grandin
America
War
Without
" The effect of Bill Clinton's NAFTA and Hillary Clinton's Colombian Free Trade Agreement has been devastating to Michigan and most of the rest of the country, and accounts for the appeal of Donald Trump. "
Greg Grandin
Rest
Free
Donald Trump