The Saber and Scroll
ten on these conflicts , with many more that focus on how these three military actions fit into the United States ’ ever-shifting foreign policy during the Cold War . Seyom Brown ’ s Faces of Power : Constancy and Change in Foreign Policy from Truman to Clinton ( Second Edition ), Gabriel Kolko ’ s Confronting the Third World , United States Foreign Policy 1945-1980 , and Lars Schoultz ’ s Beneath the United States : A History of U . S . Policy toward Latin America are all excellent examples of great works that focus on higher-level foreign policy in the Caribbean region . Other well renowned books that revolve around the specifics of each of the aforementioned conflicts are Eric Chester ’ s Rag-Tags , Scum , Riff-Raff , and Commies : The U . S . Intervention in the Dominican Republic , 1965-1966 , Mark Adkin ’ s Urgent Fury : The Battle for Grenada , and Thomas Donnelly ’ s Operation Just Cause : The Storming of Panama . Crandall ’ s Gunboat Democracy fits right in the middle of these groups , using each conflict to discuss overall foreign policy in the region on a case-by-case basis .
The best feature of Gunboat Democracy is the solid manner in which the author describes how the passage of time and ever-changing administrations that occurred between each military action influenced the overall determination to go to war in the first place . Crandall explains how , other than the omnipresent fear of the spread of communism that existed throughout the Cold War , each president had his own reasoning to send in the U . S . military to the Dominican Republic , Grenada , and Panama . For instance , Crandall hits on President Reagan ’ s desire to avoid a Tehran-like hostage situation in Grenada that crippled the Carter presidency , while later delving into how the perception of being a “ wimp ” during the presidential election unconsciously impacted President Bush ’ s determination to invade Panama to oust strongman Manuel Noriega . These vignettes help give the read a better understanding of why various leaders decided to resort to armed conflict , outside of the already pre-existing parameters of containing communism and promoting democratic regimes abroad .
However , as mentioned earlier , one of the major shortcomings that keeps Gunboat Democracy from being an even more influential study is the lack of a tactical perspective . Throughout the book , the author clearly makes the choice to focus almost exclusively on the strategic and operational levels of decision making and how these conflicts fit into the overall legacy of American foreign policy . The absence of any type of tactical analysis of military actions places the fighting in a seemingly theoretical realm and dehumanizes it almost completely . Crandall does occasionally mention the deaths of U . S . soldiers ( as in the invasion of Grenada ) when he writes of the passing of a SEAL team who “ vanished in rough seas during a reconnaissance mission ,” but these details are seemingly few and far between during the author ’ s brief descriptions of the conflicts . There are no detailed maps of troop placement , nor any discussion of actual fighting between opponents in Gunboat Democracy , and that is a tactical mistake in its own right . These
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