It’s a story every American knows: we reach our hands over the U.S. borders and play our own tune on another country’s set of strings, imprint our own melodies on Puerto Rico, on Guam, on Panama, on Cuba. We know it in different ways; some of us hear the tune of imperialism, all dissonant chords and off-beat notes, and others the sweet melody of discovery, of expansion, of freedom. Whichever way we perceive it, there is no denying our foreign presence, nor its impacts on the country we’ve elected to insert ourselves in. The extent to which U.S. intervention has impacted foreign nations it’s intervened in is both widely debatable and distinctly identifiable, depending on the country, situation, and year. Some aspects are tangible—trade partners, GDP—but others much less so, more of government, of social issues, of environment.
None of this is new: ever since the launch of the frenzied movement west in America, towards our newly gained territories of California, Nevada, Utah, we have been obsessed with expansion, both within our borders and outside. We’ve gone from California to Mexico to Panama, deposing presidents, fighting wars, and building canals, involving ourselves in countries not our own. What would be interesting to delve further into is the impact our intervention into foreign government has had on such nations, both in historical and modern contexts; for example, what did our installment of Pinochet, and our subsequent involvement in the dictatorship, result in long-term for Chile? What if we had never intervened? And the same with Argentina, Panama, Nicaragua—did we meddle with the economy directly, or indirectly? We can at least catalogue in some regard the situation with Cuba: without us, without the influence of the Cold War, and Bay of Pigs, and the Missile Crisis, they wouldn’t have had the relations they have with Russia (to the extent they do now), and the government would have had less difficulty with the sanctions we put in place against them. But what the less obvious outcomes are, the small little cracks that led to earthquakes, may remain untraced, or unknown.
annie 