U.S. troops as an instrument in foreign policy: The dominican republic in 1965 and grenada in 1983

In 1966, Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) issued a blistering critique of President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to deploy U.S. troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965. The powerful, normally pro-administration chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee stressed in his book, The Arrogance of Power, that the United States increasingly found itself identified with reactionary regimes in Latin America due to its paranoia over the establishment of another Cuba under Fidel Castro. He lamented the return to the use of American military power, drawing parallels to the growing tide of discontent with the increase of U.S. troops in Vietnam. The pugnacious, erudite Fulbright concluded that, with the Dominican intervention, “we thus lent credence to the idea that the United States is the enemy of social revolution and therefore the enemy of social justice in Latin America.”