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" 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
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" Hillary Clinton became secretary of state under Barack Obama. It's hard to convey just how stunningly cynical she has been on Colombia: In 2008, running against Obama, she opposed, in unambiguous terms, a free-trade deal with Colombia. "
Greg Grandin
She
Running
Hard
" The idea that Hillary Clinton wants to do to Central America what her husband did to Colombia is troubling. "
Greg Grandin
Husband
Her
America
" Within days of Richard Nixon's inauguration in January 1969, national-security adviser Kissinger asked the Pentagon to lay out his bombing options in Indochina. The previous president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had suspended his own bombing campaign against North Vietnam in hopes of negotiating a broader cease-fire. "
Greg Grandin
Days
Within
Vietnam
" The question of causality is complex. For some philosophers and physicists, time might not exist. And since cause-and-effect reasoning needs the concept of time - of one thing preceding another - the effort to establish causality is a mug's game, an infinite regression of increasingly unanswerable questions. "
Greg Grandin
Questions
Time
Effort
" It wasn't until 1973 that Congress and journalists began to investigate 'Operation Menu,' around the same moment that the Watergate scandal was unfolding. "
Greg Grandin
Same
Watergate
Congress
" If you search for Colombia on The Nation's website, you will see how key the country has been in regional politics. "
Greg Grandin
Country
See
Search
" 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
" On April 14, 1986, when the Reagan administration launched an airstrike on Libya in clear violation of international law, Kissinger did the rounds on news shows to justify the bombing. The day after the bombing, Kissinger appeared on ABC's 'Good Morning America' to voice his 'total support.' Attacking Libya, he said, was 'correct' and 'necessary.' "
Greg Grandin
Support
Day
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
" One of the things that has made America exceptional - compared to other crisis-prone and class-conflicted countries - is that it has long enjoyed a benefit no other modern nation in the world could claim: the ability to engage in ceaseless, endless movement outward. "
Greg Grandin
Movement
America
Long
" One of the first things the PT government did when it took office in 2003, after Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won the presidency, was to create a 'dirty list' of hundreds of companies and individual employers who were investigated by labor prosecutors and found to be using slaves. "
Greg Grandin
Labor
Government
Office
" 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
" America is exceptional, it is asserted, because, with the exception of the abolition of slavery, it has been able to extend the promise of liberal reform mostly peacefully, through its democratic institutions. "
Greg Grandin
Liberal
Been
Through
" Haiti and the Dominican Republic don't just share an island, Hispaniola, but a history, one that includes all the signal events that went into creating the modern world: Columbus, conquest, genocide, slavery, imperial war, revolution, and U.S. counterinsurgencies and military occupations. "
Greg Grandin
War
Columbus
Revolution
" 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
" Neoliberalism is hard to define. It could refer to intensified resource extraction, financialization, austerity, or something more ephemeral - a way of life - in which collective ideals of citizenship give way to marketized individualism and consumerism. "
Greg Grandin
Life
More
Way
" 'Toughness' and 'credibility' are leitmotifs that run through both Trumpian and Kissingerian deal-making. Both men insist that war and diplomacy are inseparable and that, to be effective, diplomats need to be able to wield threats and offer incentives in equal, unrestricted measure. "
Greg Grandin
Toughness
Run
Need
" 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
" 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
" 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
" America's militarized brand of malignant exceptionalism is founded on the idea that the United States transcends history. "
Greg Grandin
Brand
America
History
" 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
" 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
" Since 2010, Hillary Clinton's State Department, with the aid of Brazil, France, and Canada and in league with the Clinton Foundation and other 'philanthropists,' put into place something like a never-ending coup, an everlasting intervention. "
Greg Grandin
Canada
Like
Place
" Ronald Reagan, who led the larger New Right project of re-sanctifying U.S. foreign policy after its Vietnam disaccreditation, felt compelled to drape his support for Central American death squads in the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. "
Greg Grandin
Support
Rhetoric
New
" Hillary Clinton's progress as a public figure and politician can, in fact, be indexed perfectly by her relationship to Henry Kissinger. "
Greg Grandin
Relationship
Progress
Her
" According to Colombia's respected Escuela Nacional Sindical, as of April 2015, 105 union activists had been executed in the four years since Clinton's free-trade treaty went into effect. That's just trade unionists. "
Greg Grandin
Four
Union
Years
" 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
" As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was an active promoter of increased resource extraction in Latin America, pushing both fracking and the privatization of petroleum production. "
Greg Grandin
Active
Resource
Latin America
" In 2000, just before leaving the White House, Clinton ratcheted up military aid to Colombia. Plan Colombia, as the assistance program was called, provided billions of dollars to what was, and remains, the most repressive government in the hemisphere. "
Greg Grandin
Leaving
White
Government