Ameri-coup: A brief history of US misdeeds

There is an old joke about why there are never coups d’état in the United States of America: because there is no US embassy there. In a recent interview with CNN about the congressional investigation into the matter, longtime US diplomat and former Trump national security adviser John Bolton – whose moustache “Trump never liked”, as the Associated Press reported – declared it a “mistake” to see the insurrection as a “carefully planned coup d’état”. See, for starters, former New York Times bureau chief Stephen Kinzer’s book Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq – or the Washington Post’s finding in 2016 that “the US tried to change other countries’ governments 72 times during the Cold War”. As per the aforementioned 2016 Washington Post report on the United States’ 72 attempts at regime change during the Cold War, “meddling in foreign elections is the most successful covert tactic”. Now, in the aftermath of Bolton’s would-be revelation, the Post’s Philip Bump takes on the question: “So what coups might John Bolton have been involved in, exactly?” Utilising data from the Cline Center at the University of Illinois, Bump observes that, since Bolton joined the Ronald Reagan administration in 1982, more than 350 coup attempts have transpired internationally – including events “that one might not think of as a coup attempt – like the US-led toppling of the government in Afghanistan” after the attacks of September 11, 2001.