U.S. AGAINST THE THIRD WORLD: The American Response to Revolutionary Nationalism

This is essentially a slick ""radical"" job which proposes that old-fashioned dictatorships no longer provide the kind of Third World population control suited to American interests, and concludes that the U.S. should stop sending gunboats and napalm against ""change-oriented"" regimes. ""It should be as possible to 'sell' nonintervention today as it has been to 'sell' intervention,"" and Gurtov gives an absorbing series of case studies a la Richard Barnet in Intervention and Revolution (1969). The murdered Lumumba was no communist, any more than the 1958 rebels against Sukarno set up by the CIA were ""anti-communist."" Gurtov concludes with a plea that the cessation of clumpish, visible, transparently ill-motivated moves against nationalist regimes would greatly benefit the U.S. Permissible exceptions to the nonintervention rule would have been. . .helping to kick the Belgians out of the Congo and aiding the Angolan rebels (to bring Algerian-style stability to Gulf Oil's investments). Gurtov's criteria for exemplary ""change-oriented"" governments make General Amin and the Peruvian colonels into the wave of the future, not to mention any number of other ""revolutionary nationalists"" (of whom Mussolini was a highly ""change-oriented"" forebear). The sales job on ""nonintervention"" is also supposed to restore domestic confidence in our rulers. Gurtov's blend of self-righteousness and soft soap is not itself confidence-inspiring.