But if you are going to use the argument that making a successful geopolitical omelet requires breaking eggs, you'd better have something edible to show for all the shattered shells lying around. As Kinzer makes clear, the problem is that all too many of the interventions he recounts were not just utterly ruthless; they were utterly unnecessary.

It should have been obvious that the damage to the countries concerned was likely to be out of all proportion to the possible gains to the United States. But during the Cold War, ignorant and ideological official cliques in Washington repeatedly convinced themselves that "you are with us or you are against us," and that a range of nationalist governments around the world, anti-American to a greater or lesser degree, were part of the Soviet global conspiracy and had to be destroyed.

In several cases, while the coups themselves were highly successful, the long-term results proved disastrous - not just for America's reputation abroad but for American interests as well. That was true, for example, of the CIA's overthrow of the democratic nationalist prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh - accused quite falsely of being pro-Communist - and the restoration of autocratic rule by the shah.

That operation, run by Kermit Roosevelt (Teddy Roosevelt's grandson) was brilliantly executed, bringing about Mossadegh's downfall even after the shah himself had lost his nerve and fled to Italy. But as a result, the role of opposition to the shah was assumed by religious fundamentalists, and ended in the disastrous revolution of 1979. The deep Iranian popular fear of the United States that was fed by the 1953 coup continues to haunt American-Iranian relations to this day.

In the case of Cuba, the decision in 1898 to betray the Cuban rebels against Spain and impose American hegemony on the island fueled an anti-American nationalism that continues to preserve the Communist government. Mass support for governments like those of Castro and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela has also been fed by other U.S. interventions in the region.