Dulles also came from a family of clergymen. He was a deep religious believer. His father was a preacher. His grandfather had been a missionary in India, and this gave him another strain, which is very important in the American regime-change era, and that is this sense of religious mission, this belief that since the United States has been blessed with prosperity and democracy, we have, not just the right, but perhaps even the God-given obligation to go to other countries and share the benefits of all we have with them, particularly to countries that may not even be advanced enough to realize how much they want our political system. So Dulles saw the world in a strictly black-and-white way.

He saw, at that time, a communist conspiracy all over the world as working relentlessly to undermine the United States. For example, he opposed all cultural exchanges with any communist country. He tried for years to keep U.S. reporters from visiting China. He was against summit meetings of all kinds. He didn't want agreement with communist countries on any subject, because he thought any agreement would be just a trick to get America to lower its guard.

Now, when Iran nationalized its oil industry, when Guatemala tried to restrict the operations of United Fruit Company, Dulles did not see this as a reflection of a desire by people in a foreign country to control their own resources. He rather saw it as an anti-American move, undoubtedly manipulated from the Kremlin, which had a much more profound goal than simply bothering an American company. This was just the beginnings of an anti-American attack.

Now, one of the things I ask in my book is: Why did we so tragically misjudge nationalist movements in developing countries, like Iran and Guatemala and later Chile? Why did we interpret them as part of an international conspiracy, which, as documents later proved, they were not?

I think it was for this reason. American statesmen and diplomats who study the history of diplomacy are actually studying the history of European diplomacy. We're very Eurocentric. Our diplomats and our statesmen are very well versed in European political traditions. They're familiar with alliance politics and wars of conquest and big powers that use small powers secretly for their own means, but the desire of poor people in poor countries to control their own natural resources has never been a part of European history. It's not a syndrome that Americans who study Europe are familiar with, and that, along with an instinctive desire to protect American companies, I think led them to misjudge nationalist movements and misinterpret them as part of a global conspiracy to undermine the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Or perhaps not care, but care about U.S. companies, as in Guatemala, United Fruit being able to have free reign.

STEPHEN KINZER: I think it was very much a sense that the companies must know what's best for the United States in those countries, but in addition, we managed to persuade ourselves that a government that was bothering American companies must also be harassing and oppressing its own people, and this is an argument that I think is very well tailored to the American soul. You know, we really are a very compassionate people, and Americans hate the idea that there are people suffering in some faraway country. American leaders who want to intervene in those countries for very ignoble reasons understand this, and they use that motive, they play on the American compassion to achieve support for their interventions.

AMY GOODMAN: So talk about what fuels Iran today, the feeling Iranians have for America, based on the coup the U.S. was involved with in 1953.

STEPHEN KINZER: It's hard to believe today that we could even use the word “Iran” and “democracy” in the same sentence, but the fact is Iran was a functioning, thriving democracy in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Because Iran nationalized its oil industry, rather than allow it to continue being exploited by foreigners, Iran became a target for foreign intervention, and the U.S. did overthrow the democracy of Iran in the summer of 1953.

We placed on the throne the Shah. He ruled for 25 years with increasing repression. His repression produced the explosion of the late 1970s, the Islamic revolution. That revolution brought to power a fanatically anti-American clique of mullahs who began their regime by taking American diplomats as hostage, has then spent 25 years oppressing its own people and doing whatever it could, sometimes very violently, to undermine American interests in the world, and that is the regime with which we are now approaching a very serious world crisis regarding the nuclear issue.

Now, had we not intervened in 1953 and crushed Iranian democracy, we might have had a thriving democracy in the heart of the Muslim Middle East all these 50 years. I can hardly wrap my mind around how different the Middle East might be now. This regime that's now in power in Iran would never have come to power, and the current nuclear crisis would never have emerged. This is a great example of how our intervention ultimately leads us to regimes much worse than the ones we originally set out to overthrow.

Now, how do you think that people in Iran react when Americans point a finger at them and say, “You’re a tyranny over there. You’re a brutal dictatorship. You should have a democracy. You should have a free regime”? Well, they say, “We had a democracy here, until you came in and overthrew it.” Now, the United States today has some very legitimate complaints against the Iranian government, but we have to understand that Iranians also have some very legitimate complaints against us, and that should be a recognition that would lead us into negotiations with them at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Kinzer, we’re going to have to leave it there for today, but next week, part two of this discussion on Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, looking at 14 coups of the last more than a century that the U.S. was involved with.

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