The sorrows of empire

Ted Grimsrud—November 7, 2025

The realities of the American Empire were hidden right before my eyes when I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. Much of the violence we perpetrated on the world was not hidden, it just was not part of the story we told about America. Now that I know more, I am shocked that I could have been so positive about my country. I attribute my failure to see to the power of the embedded theology of uncritical nationalism. Like most Americans, I was invested in believing the best and filtered out everything that would challenge that belief. In this post, I will give a quick overview of what I did not see with my rose-colored glasses.

The Truman Doctrine established the template for US intervention “everywhere in the world” shortly after World War II. It remains in effect down to the present. I sketch here the history of American interventions of varying severity. These engagements have been truly global, as even this quick survey will illustrate. In future posts, we will look in a little more detail at two momentous sets of interventions, America’s post-Cold War continuation of the adversarial relationship with Russia and America’s support for Israel.

The first intervention of many

Soon after World War II, American leaders justified military engagement in Greece to resist Soviet “expansionism.” As it turned out, the Soviets did not join the conflict that emerged over struggles over Greece’s political future. They kept the agreement of the Yalta Conference regarding the postwar world. Central and eastern Europe were in the Soviet “sphere of influence” (where the Soviets intervened); the Soviets recognized Greece as part of the British sphere.

In Greece, indigenous leftists fought with a right-wing monarchy that the British wanted to restore to power. By embracing military aid to the monarchists, the US affirmed the military action taken by the British beginning in 1944. The British action predated any of the military actions that the Soviets took likewise to assert their “sphere of influence” over noncooperative Soviet bloc nations. The first use of violence to resist self-determination came not from the Soviets but from the British. When postwar British leaders determined that Britain would need greatly to curtail its engagement in sustaining its empire, they encouraged the Americans to “pick up the reigns.” In Greece the Americans intervened on behalf of anti-democratic interests. The Greek civil war resulted in a victory for the right-wing forces. The victors installed a military dictatorship that oversaw an unjust political system that lasted for many years.

A deadly, ineffective, unresolved war

By 1950, American leaders had committed to the militarization of their foreign policy. A thorough rationale for warism written by Paul Nitze of the state department justified this stance. This report, NSC-68, established the foundation for American policy for the decades following. It echoed the Truman Doctrine and proclaimed that the Soviets were bent on world domination: “The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.”

Ideas from NSC-68 provided the basic rationale for the American decision to intervene in Korea. The US supported the authoritarian leader Syngman Rhee’s attempt to consolidate power over the entire Korean peninsula. Rhee’s forces vied with Soviet-supported communist forces led by Kim Il-Sung. This conflict became an overt war in June 1950, and the US jumped in. This war lasted over three years and greatly heightened Cold War tensions. The Korean War led to the full implementation of NSC-68 that involved an immense military buildup, further militarizing the US economy, and expansive global military commitments.

The Korean conflict, like later conflicts Americans misread as Soviet expansionism, should have been seen as a local civil war. The Soviets played only a minor role. The conflict nearly triggered an American nuclear attack. When Truman defied his advisers and stopped a nuclear attack, he reinforced the sense that the use of nuclear weapons should be taboo. Roughly three million Koreans lost their lives in this conflict, 75% of them noncombatants. The Korean War marked the transformation of the US State Department’s focus from diplomacy to military action. And it marked a similar transformation of the presidency. After 1950 and the prosecution of the Korean War, military matters remained the central focus of American presidents.

Overthrow (and one that got away)

The Truman Doctrine’s “Soviet threat” became the the basis for American armed intervention all around the world. I will mention just three examples here—none of which, in actuality, had much to do with the Soviet Union. These three occasions of direct American involvement in the quest to overthrow existing governments in Iran, Guatemala, and Cuba do show, though, how the Pax Americana worked on the ground.

In 1901, the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company gained a monopoly over Iranian oil and claimed 85% or so of the earnings, leaving little in Iran. An Iranian nationalist movement gained power in the aftermath of World War II. Its leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, a committed democrat, was elected prime minister in 1951. His program sought to gain for Iran a fair share of oil revenue so as to strengthen the nation’s civil society. The Iranian parliament nationalized the oil industry. Britain’s elite decided the only option to keep their oil profits would be to overthrow the democratic government of Iran. Mossadegh threw the British out of the country. The Britons falsely claimed Mossadegh had moved Iran in a communist direction. In the name of the Truman Doctrine, America’s CIA intervened secretly to “save Iran from communism,” removing Mossadegh from power in 1953. Iran’s monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah, whose power had been reduced by Iran’s democratic transformation, led the new government. In time, the Shah’s oppressive rule, backed by the US, ended in an Islamic revolution in 1979. Instead of accepting Mossadegh’s desire for a relationship characterized by mutual respect, the US helped create and sustain decades of misery for the Iranian people and, ultimately, an intransigent enemy.

A second occasion of CIA involvement came much closer to home. Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán became the second elected president of Guatemala in 1951. Thanks to the CIA, he did not finish his term, and his country entered a long and terrible nightmare of repression that killed hundreds of thousands over the next fifty years. Árbenz instituted a land reform law to allow the government to buy uncultivated land owned by foreign corporations and transfer ownership to small farmers. United Fruit Company bore the brunt of this new law. The CIA overthrew Árbenz, ended Guatemala’s democratic era, and set into motion probably the worst expression of massive government terrorist violence in the modern history of the western hemisphere.

After centuries as a Spanish colony, Cuba gained its “independence” following the Spanish-American War of 1898. However, Cuban political life was dominated by dictators who served US economic and organized crime interests. Revolutionaries drove out the dictator on January 1, 1959, ended American corporations’ domination of the Cuban economy, and shut down Mafia gambling. From the beginning US leaders viewed the Cuban revolution with hostility. The CIA tried to overthrow Fidel Castro with the so-called Bay of Pigs action. The action failed and began a long history of hostility toward Cuba. Remarkably, Cuba has sustained its independence in relation to the American Empire. Numerous attempts to assassinate Castro, severe economic sanctions, and enforce Cuban isolation from other western hemisphere countries all failed.

America’s greatest foreign policy disaster (Vietnam)

After World War II, a powerful indigenous movement sought independence in Vietnam when the Japanese occupation ended. The US supported France’s attempt to take over its former colony. When Vietnamese resistance turned into an all-out war, the US aided France. After the Vietnamese nationalists won a decisive battle in 1954, the French left. A peace conference led to an agreement to allow for Vietnamese self-determination, including an election in 1956 for the government that would unify all of Vietnam. However, the Americans rejected the agreement and initiated a low-intensity military conflict in order to defeat the pro-independence forces.

Over the next eight years, Vietnam became the US’s largest military engagement in the post-World War II era. US intervention continued until 1975. From start to finish, this war was a failure. Intense bombing campaigns failed to achieve American war aims but did devastate Southeast Asia. This failed war led to the premature end of the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, traumatized and killed millions of Indochinese, destroyed Cambodia’s civil society and created the conditions for the Khmer Rouge genocide, led to over 50,000 American war dead, and resulted in lifelong trauma for countless other American soldiers.

Business as usual

Two more paradigmatic expressions of American intervention in Latin America resulted in enormous long-term suffering. The US overthrow the democratically elected Chilean government in the early 1970s and sponsored the Contra War in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

In 1970, Chile elected a socialist president who advocated nationalizing Chile’s copper mines, controlled by US corporations. Salvador Allende believed in democratic processes, but the Americans painted him as a communist puppet for the Soviets. President Nixon told the CIA “to make the economy scream.” Over the next three years, the US disrupted Chile’s economy, undermined Allende’s policies, and strengthened forces within Chile hostile toward Allende. These actions culminated in a coup on September 11, 1973. The new regime murdered more than 3,200 people and jailed and tortured tens of thousands more in the next two years.

In Nicaragua, revolutionary Sandinistas overthrew the American-supported dictatorship in 1979, redistributed land, turned large estates into cooperatives, and helped peasants to become landowners. After his 1980 election, President Reagan paid regimes in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to provide bases for Nicaraguan “Contras” trained by Americans to wage war on Nicaragua. The US manipulated a Nicaraguan election that removed the Sandinistas from power. The new government returned the Nicaraguan economy to its pre-Sandinista state. Nicaragua soon again became one of the poorest countries in the world.

The Cold War ends, American warism continues

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Cold War ended. The US faced a big test. Should not a “peace dividend” follow? Reluctantly, the George H.W. Bush Defense Department agreed to the largest cuts in its budget since the immediate aftermath of World War II. However, before Bush implemented the cuts, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait. Refusing to negotiate a diplomatic resolution, Bush started bombing on January 16, 1991. The American military prevailed in Operation Desert Storm. No “peace dividend.” The US replaced the Soviet as enemy with global terrorism. This war and the decade of sanctions that followed transformed Iraq from one of the most prosperous Middle Eastern nations into one of the most impoverished.

September 11, 2001, stands as a defining date for the United States. President George W. Bush’s response to the attacks of 9/11 continued the post-World War II pattern for US leaders. Aggression toward first Afghanistan and then Iraq let to the overthrow of the governments of both nations. Then, in each case, chaos followed, not some sort of resolution. Eventually, the Americans had to abandon those interventions as failures. In turn, President Obama oversaw military intervention followed by chaos in the overthrow of the government of Libya in 2011.

The history of interventions by the American military and its allies around the world since 1945 shows few positive consequences. They have contradicted the ideals of the Atlantic Charter, FDR’s Four Freedoms speech, and the founding ideals of the UN. Ironically, few of the interventions have been successful in terms of their stated purposes. However, the most recent interventions have revealed even more that we near the terminus of the American Empire as we will see in my two concluding chapters considering failing actions in Ukraine and Gaza.

[This is the 20^th of a long series of blog posts, “A Christian pacifist in the American Empire” (this link takes you to the series homepage). The19^th post in the series, “The quest for a unipolar world order,” may be found by clicking on this link. The 21^st post, “The Cold War redux and the demise of the American Empire” may be found by clicking on this link.]