Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Fifth Freedom
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
105
interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, consistent with the Wilson
corollary: the Doctrine meant “that we not only refuse to tolerate foreign
colonization, control, or the extension of a foreign political system to our
hemisphere, but we take alarm from the appearance on the continent of
foreign ideologies, commercial exploitation, cartel arrangements, or other
symptoms of increased non-hemispheric influence.” The US must have
“a stable, secure, and friendly flank to the South, not confused by enemy
penetration, political, economic or military.” The prime concern was not
the USSR but rather Europe, including sales of arms by the British to
Chile and Ecuador, by Sweden to Argentina, and by France to Argentina
and Brazil.
From January 1945, military and civilian officials of the War and
Navy departments argued for an extensive system of US bases,
curtailment of all foreign military aid and military sales, training of Latin
American military officers and supply of arms to Latin America by the
US under a comprehensive military assistance program. While laying
these plans for “our little region over here which never has bothered
anybody,” the US was in no mood to allow others similar rights
elsewhere, certainly not the USSR. Secretary of State Byrnes in fact
objected to these plans for Latin America because it might prejudice US
initiatives elsewhere that he regarded as more important, in particular,
in Greece and Turkey, which “are our outposts”—on the borders of the
USSR, which had far more serious security concerns than the US. The
“outposts” were also intended to buttress US ambitions in the crucial
Middle East region with its incomparable energy reserves, then passing
into American hands.
Commenting on an array of material of this sort laying out US plans,
much of it classified and recently released, Leffler notes that these
moves were made while US officials were “paying lip service to the
United Nations and worrying about the impact of regional agreements in