Counter Revolution : 20th Century U.S. Foreign Policy

Many people are too young to have witnessed what the United States did when revolution erupted in Cuba. Others from a previous generation remember the effort to snuff out the Cuban Revolution, while U.S. support of Chiang Kai-shek against the Chinese revolutionaries happened before their time. Almost nobody who observed day-to-day the actions of the United States against the Russian Revolution is still around.

The effort to put down revolution has been a central focus of U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century, especially since World War II. Not only did the United States work to keep revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua, and other countries from winning, but it maintained a strong hostility for years, even decades, after they had won. Many writers trace the beginning of the cold war from 1945 without considering what went before. Actually, the cold war was in good part a continuation of the deep hostility of the United States to the 1917 Russian Revolution and the socialist state it created-a hostility only par­tially interrupted by World War II.

The U.S. posture toward revolution remains one of the world's crucial questions. In opposing revolution, the United States is opposing the striving of peoples around the world to free themselves from poverty, oppression, and exploitation. For many of these peoples there is no solution except to break out by revolution from the social, economic, and political conditions which hem in their societies. And the United States' hostility to revolution creates a permanent threat of U.S. military interven­tion in one place or another.