Professor Russell Crandall, Now of the Pentagon: A

Controversial Analyst and Three Controversial

Caribbean Interventions

In the U.S. policy arsenal, a series of specialized weapons stand ready to defend democracy, and perhaps of equal importance, to serve Washington’s strategic interests abroad. In “Gunboat Democracy; U.S. Interventions in the Dominican Republic, Grenada and Panama” (2006), Professor Russell Crandall, on leave from Davidson College in North Carolina, contextualizes a particular series of U.S. involvements in the Caribbean over the past several decades in order to pinpoint how strategic regional interests have shaped U.S. policy towards the three specific countries under discussion. Crandall’s central and most controversial claim is that democracy has been made unquestionably stronger in the Caribbean after the United States intervened with overwhelming military force.

Professor Crandall’s prose is easy to read and graciously styled, but is also grossly opinionated and wondrously simplistic. His main objective is to provide objective criteria in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the three radical interventions which become the raw meat of his analysis. The criteria includes whether or not Washington made prudent decisions based on all of the information that was available at the time. Also, Crandall means to weigh in on the consequences of U.S. military intervention in the purported defense of democratic institutions in these countries. Ultimately, and perhaps inevitably, given his highly wrought security/strategy background, and his adept penetration of the Pentagon’s bureaucratic corridors, Crandall easily concludes that the three interventions were legitimate.

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