Articles by Greg Grandin

Source: The Nation

Why is no one else talking about the fact that Hillary Clinton has been endorsed by a war criminal?

Over the last month, Bernie Sanders, in slowly cobbling together what might be called a “Bernie Doctrine,” has introduced a radical concept into American politics: the idea that history matters, that every effect has a cause.

It seems a simple point—that actions taken in the past reverberate into the present—but it’s not. For America’s militarized brand of malignant exceptionalism is founded on the idea that the United States transcends history. That statement—that America believes itself exempt from the law of cause and effect—seems especially abstract. But the belief has a very concrete expression: a refusal to recognize the reality of blowback. read more

Source: Salon.com

Nixon introduced us to permanent, extrajudicial war in Southeast Asia, and it continues today in the Middle East

In April 2014, ESPN published a photograph of an unlikely duo: Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and former national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger at the Yankees-Red Sox season opener. In fleece jackets on a crisp spring day, they were visibly enjoying each other’s company, looking for all the world like a twenty-first-century geopolitical version of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The subtext of their banter, however, wasn’t about sex, but death. read more

Source: Tom Dispatch

The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the Shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key figure in Nixon and Kissinger’s move into the Middle East, wanted to be dealt with as a serious person. He expected his country to be treated with the same respect Washington showed other key Cold War allies like West Germany and Great Britain. As Nixon’s national security adviser and, after 1973, secretary of state, Kissinger’s job was to pump up the Shah, to make him feel like he truly was the “king of kings.” read more

Source: The Nation

Pope Francis and Fidel Castro share a long, intertwined political history—one that also points forward to a global ideological realignment.

Pope Francis arrived in Cuba on Saturday, and these images, including the pontiff’s meeting with Fidel Castro, are saturated with history. Here we have an Argentine, “Peronist” pope—born just eight years after Ernesto “Che” Guevara, his compatriot and Castro’s revolutionary comrade—celebrating an enormous, open-air mass under an iconic image of Che and attended by the Argentine president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. In a way, the pope’s visit baptized the beginning of a new era—what should be called not the “normalization” of Washington-Havana relations but rather the normalization of the United States’ perverse half-century obsession with Cuba—one that the pope himself was instrumental in bringing about. In The Washington Post, R.R. Reno, who is editor of the arch-conservative and anti-Jesuit First Things, says that “Francis himself is attracted to clerical special ops,” and his secret diplomacy between Havana and Washington was Kissinger-worthy (except of course most of Kissinger’s machinations greatly increased the world’s share of misery). read more

Source: The Nation

Leftists often describe Henry Kissinger as a unique moral monster, but his intellectual framework pervades the entire national security state, from the neocons to Obama.

When I told friends and colleagues that I was writing a book about the legacy of Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy, many made mention of Christopher Hitchens’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger. But I saw my purpose as antithetical to Hitchens’s polemic, which is a good example of what the great historian Charles Beard, in 1936, dismissed as the “devil theory of war”—placing the blame for militarism on a single, isolable cause: a “wicked man.” To really understand the sources of conflict, Beard argued, you had to look at the big picture, to consider the way “war is our own work,” emerging out of “the total military and economic situation.” In making the case that Kissinger should be tried—and convicted—for war crimes, Hitchens didn’t look at the big picture. Instead, he focused obsessively on the morality of one man, his devil: Henry Kissinger. read more

Source: The Nation

With its government about to fall, Guatemala is finally questioning the neoliberal orthodoxy of the post–Cold War world.

UPDATE—Thursday, Sept. 3, 11:50 am: As predicted, Pérez Molina has resigned. Stripped of his immunity, charges of corruption related to widespread custom fraud were brought against him. It’s unclear what comes next, or if national elections — not just for president but for pretty much every legislative and municipal post — will go forward on Sunday. There’s also reports that the CICIG is investigating Álvaro Arzú, a former president, current mayor of Guatemala, and paterfamilias of one of Guatemala’s most historic oligarch families. Who knows where this all may lead… read more