Greg Grandin

“The argument that capitalism was dependent on slavery is, of course, not new. In 1944, Eric Williams, in 'Capitalism and Slavery,' made the case.”

“If all Henry Kissinger contributed to the Middle East were a regional arms race, petrodollar addiction, Iranian radicalization, and the Tehran-Riyadh conflict, it would be bad enough. His legacy, however, is far worse than that: He has to answer for his role in the rise of political Islam.”

“The unraveling of America's long mid-century domestic consensus, which ran from about 1941 to 1966, had begun earlier, under Lyndon B. Johnson.”

“A new book by 'New York Times' reporter Charlie Savage, 'Power Wars,' suggests that there has been little substantive difference between George W. Bush's administration and Obama's when it comes to national-security policies or the legal justifications used to pursue regime change in the Greater Middle East.”

“Defenders of Wilson are correct to beg for context when considering his legacy. But it is they who ignore the context: the role Wilson played in using war, including Haiti's racist counterinsurgency, to nationalize white supremacy, militarism, and Christian evangelism.”

“Within days of Richard Nixon's inauguration in January 1969, national-security adviser Kissinger asked the Pentagon to lay out his bombing options in Indochina. The previous president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had suspended his own bombing campaign against North Vietnam in hopes of negotiating a broader cease-fire.”

“Most critical histories of U.S. involvement in Iran rightly began with the joint British-U.S. coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, which installed Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. But it was Kissinger who, in 1972, greatly deepened the relationship between Washington and Tehran.”

“Without U.S. input, the countries of South America joined forces in 2008 to shut down a coup attempt in Bolivia and prevented a war between Ecuador and Colombia.”

“Most students of Kissinger find it hard to say anything about Kissinger that isn't about the man himself. He is such an outsize figure that he eclipses his own context, leading his many biographers, critics, and admirers to focus nearly exclusively on the quirks of his personality or his moral failings.”

“Obama and Kuczynski each promised to do all they could to enact the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”

“Endorsing Ronald Reagan in 1980, Kissinger threw in with America's new militarists, who would jump-start a revived Cold War and drive to retake the Third World.”

“Honduras in 2009 and Paraguay in 2012 were low-hanging fruit, small countries with outsized oligarchies, where mild reformers were easily dispatched.”

“As she was about to run for president in 2008, Clinton opposed a free-trade agreement with Panama - an agreement that, as Sanders pointed out, would make the kind of money-laundering we learned about from the Panama papers even more pervasive.”

“In the 1960s, after the Cuban Revolution, CIA and FBI agents often coordinated their activities with anti-Castro Cuban exiles.”

“The journalist Walter Lippmann identified in Henry Ford, for all his peculiarity, a common strain of "primitive Americanism." The industrialist's conviction that he could make the world conform to his will was founded on a faith that success in economic matters should, by extension, allow capitalists to try their hands "with equal success" at "every other occupation." "Mr. Ford is neither a crank nor a freak," Lippmann insisted, but "merely the logical exponent of American prejudices about wealth and success.”

“According to some tallies, since 1776, the United States has been at war 93 percent of its existence, passing through a mere 21 years of peace.”

“Neoliberalism is hard to define. It could refer to intensified resource extraction, financialization, austerity, or something more ephemeral - a way of life - in which collective ideals of citizenship give way to marketized individualism and consumerism.”

“Kissinger's unusually high body count and singular moral imperiousness has the effect, among his critics, of obscuring his didactic utility. An outsized personality who has committed outsized mayhem, Kissinger eclipses his own context. Yet, as animals were to the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Kissinger is good to think with.”

“In 1954, Guatemala's deposed president, the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz, was forced to strip down to his underwear and photographed before being allowed to leave the country.”

“In the early 1800s, both Spain and Portugal disseminated the smallpox vaccine throughout the Americas via the 'arm to arm of the blacks,' that is, enslaved Africans and African-Americans, often children, who were being moved along slave routes as cargo from one city to another to be sold.”