Examining over a century of US intervention in Latin America, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin reveals how the region has long served as a laboratory for US foreign policy, providing generations of Washington policy makers with an opportunity to rehearse a broad range of diplomatic and military tactics—tactics that then were applied elsewhere in the world as the US became a global superpower. During the Great Depression, for instance, FDR's Good Neighbor policy taught the United States to use "soft power" effectively and provided a blueprint for its postwar "empire by invitation." In the 1980s, Reagan likewise turned to Latin America, but now to rehabilitate "hard power" after the debacle of Vietnam, putting the United States on the road to its current crisis: endless, forever wars.

This completely revised edition includes new information on the US invasion of Panama, US interventions in Cuba, Guatemala, and Chile, Plan Colombia and the War on Drugs, the Obama administration's involvement in the 2009 coup in Honduras, and the current crisis at the US-Mexico border. Most provocatively, Grandin argues that the origins of many of the current threats to American democracy—disinformation, permanent surveillance, political extremism and out-of-control militarism—were foreshadowed in the United States' Central American policy.