The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War--a Tragedy in Three Acts

A critical history of the CIA’s origin story, from WWII through the Philippines, Vietnam, Guatemala, Hungary, and beyond. Anderson details the role of American arrogance in guiding one misstep after another. This quote, about the US approach in Vietnam, nicely sums up the overriding hubris that has caused so many international scandals and failures in the post-WWII era:

In essence, so overwhelming was the U.S. advantage, and so limitless its resources, that it never bothered to try to be smart. Instead, and rather than deal with the tedious details of nation-building or the painstaking work of hearts-and-minds political warfare, it could simply bomb its way to a solution, and if a half-million soldiers on the ground didn’t solve the problem, then surely another 100,000 would. As history going back to the Persians and Romans clearly attests, even the most powerful armies and empires can be defeated if, in their arrogance, they insist on being stupid.
[Emphasis mine.]

Beyond that arrogance, though, what comes across clearly in this history is America’s deep mistrust of the democratic process. Again and again, the administration and the intelligence community either failed to support the spontaneous growth of democracy, or they actively worked to undermine & overturn it. In one episode after another, with few if any counterexamples, US intelligence & military leaders’ distrust of popular will (combined, of course, with their immense power) set the cause of international democracy further and further back. It’s a shameful aspect of our history, and it certainly didn’t end with the chronological end of this book, but Anderson does a good job exposing the way that it formed our approach to international intelligence.