Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan's Evangelical Vision by Diane Winston

Author:Diane Winston [Winston, Diane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 HISTORY / General, HIS036060 HISTORY / United States / 20th Century, REL084000 RELIGION / Religion, Politics & State, POL042020 POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Conservatism & Liberalism
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2023-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

Grenada: The Backstory and the Invasion

In 1974, Britain granted independence to the 220-square-mile island of Grenada, and Eric Gairy became its first prime minister. Gairy enjoyed good relations with the United States, but his standing at home was marred by his mix of authoritarianism, idiosyncrasy (he was obsessed with UFOs), and indifference to financial realities. While Gairy was in New York discussing extraterrestrials, Maurice Bishop, the Marxist leader of the leftist New Jewel (Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education and Liberation of the People) Movement,9 was in Grenada advocating for reform. Bishop, whose political career had been inspired by the American civil rights movement, was a London-trained lawyer who promised to help Grenada’s poor. Seeing his calls resonate with his countrymen, he declared himself prime minister of the People’s Revolutionary Government in March 1979.10

The Carter administration considered intervening, but the Senate Intelligence Committee blocked the plan. Other international developments loomed larger. In January Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, had fled his country due to widespread discontent with his regime. Concurrently, an Islamic Republic was forming under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who after decades of exile in France was poised to return to Tehran. The Iranian Revolution ended almost four decades of a key US alliance at a moment when the administration faced a slew of international and domestic setbacks. Military ties with Nicaragua had been severed, Muslim extremists had assassinated the US ambassador to Afghanistan, and a nuclear meltdown had rocked the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. Rather than act against Bishop—who headed a very small nation of just under one hundred thousand people—US leaders distanced themselves from his regime. The gap widened under the Reagan administration. Bishop’s growing dependence on Soviet-backed Cuba, compounded by his disparaging remarks about Reagan and the United States, nettled the president and his advisors. When Congress rebuffed another plan to destabilize Grenada’s Marxist government, the administration used diplomacy to halt the flow of international loans to the country. Since Grenada’s economy was already precarious, this additional pressure made life even harder for the islanders, and communist support became vital to the regime. In the summer of 1981, the United States intensified its opposition by staging naval maneuvers that simulated the invasion of a hostage-holding “enemy in the Eastern Caribbean.”11

Grenada may have been a small, impoverished island, but its strategic symbolism propelled Washington’s interest in its fate. Historically, US leaders viewed their primary sphere of influence, intrinsic to the national interest, as extending from the continental United States (later including Alaska and Hawaii) to the Caribbean and Latin America.12 The Cuban Revolution, which ended in 1959, imperiled US hemispheric hegemony, and subsequent Marxist activities in the region were viewed as a threat. Emboldened by the US stalemate in Vietnam, the Soviets, according to some US foreign policy experts, had increased their activities around the globe, fomenting communist insurgencies in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. As Time magazine noted, “U.S. timidity in recent years has encouraged Soviet mischief in diverse parts of the world.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.