The country that condemns the meddling is the one that does it most.
Washington treats interfering in another nation's government as a crime against democracy — when someone else does it. This hub is the ledger of how often, how openly, and with what results the United States has done exactly that: picked other countries' governments for them, by coup, by cash, and by war.
What this hub is about
This hub documents one behavior: the United States choosing who governs other countries. It is a specific, heavily evidenced category within Crimes of Empire, and its thesis is uncomfortable and precise — that a nation which presents foreign interference as a singular assault on democracy is, by the only systematic counts available, the most prolific interferer of the modern era, and that its interventions mostly failed even by the goals it set for them. We build it the way that makes it unanswerable: from the United States' own records — declassified CIA histories, the Senate's Church Committee, a congressional apology — graded fact by fact, with the exaggerations fenced off as carefully as the crimes are documented.
Each spoke is a self-contained, graded ledger. Together they describe the same instinct at three different volumes:
- The loud way. “The Coup Ledger” answers the viral “America loves a coup” reel with the real, graded count: Lindsey O'Rourke's peer-reviewed dataset documents 72 US regime-change attempts in the Cold War alone (64 covert, 6 overt), plus the pre-1947 banana-war era and the post-1991 wars — tiered from the declassified, US-admitted coups (Iran, Guatemala, Chile) to the overt invasions, while flagging the reel's own category errors.
- The quiet way. “The Ballot-Box Ledger” is the part that needs no coup — just money and propaganda. Dov Levin's database counts 81 US interventions in foreign elections, more than any country on earth, from the CIA buying Italy's 1948 vote to secretly funding Japan's ruling party to bankrolling Yeltsin in 1996 — with the crucial fence that a foreign government meddling is not the same as a domestic lobby.
- The part nobody plans for. “The Blowback Ledger” asks whether any of it worked. Graded case by case against each intervention's own stated goal, the answer is a pattern of catastrophe — Iran 1953 to the 1979 theocracy, the Afghan jihad to al-Qaeda and 9/11, Iraq to ISIS, Libya to open-air slave markets, Guatemala to a UN-certified genocide. “Blowback” is the CIA's own word.
OPENThe full entry-by-entry table of all 72 O'Rourke cases, each tagged covert or overt and graded FACT or SOME SMOKE — the complete ledger behind the tiered summary.
OPENThe country-by-country breakdown of Levin's 81 election interventions, tagged by method (covert cash, propaganda, overt endorsement, aid conditionality) and by whether the intervention appears to have changed the result.
OPENThe post-2000 record the academic datasets stop short of: the overt “democracy promotion” machinery, and whether the current pressure on Venezuela and the designs on Greenland become the next entries on all three ledgers at once.
This is a living record, and our readers make it stronger. If there is a thread here you want us to chase, or you have documents or firsthand knowledge that would sharpen a claim, send it to us. We read every lead.
Who gets to choose
Strip away the justifications — anti-communism, counter-terrorism, human rights, stability — and a single assumption runs under all of it: that the United States is entitled to decide who governs other countries, and that the people who actually live there are not. That assumption is older than the CIA and is still operating today. It expresses itself loudly or quietly depending on cost and risk, but it is one behavior, not many, and the most honest way to see it is to lay the methods side by side. The point of this hub is not that America is uniquely evil; every empire has arranged its neighbors. The point is the gap between that record and the story the United States tells about itself — as democracy's defender, the victim of interference rather than its leading practitioner.
The coup and the invasion
The most direct way to change a government is to remove it. The coup ledger counts how often the US has — 72 regime-change attempts in the Cold War alone, per O'Rourke, the great majority of them covert, plus the open invasions from Hawaii to Iraq. This is the method everyone pictures, and the one most likely to be remembered, because occasionally it leaked or was investigated. It is also the tip: for every Iran or Chile that became famous, several more never did.
The funded election
Cheaper, deniable, and far more common is simply shaping the vote. The ballot-box ledger follows the money and the propaganda — 81 US election interventions by Levin's count, the most of any country — from the CIA's founding operation in Italy in 1948 to the secret funding of allied parties in Chile, Japan, and beyond. It is the same goal as the coup (a friendly government) by gentler means, and it is the method that makes America's post-2016 outrage at foreign interference so hard to take at face value.
The blowback
Then comes the question the interveners almost never ask in advance: and then what? The blowback ledger grades the results against the promises, and finds a pattern of outcomes arguably as bad as or worse than what was disrupted — a theocracy, a terror network, a genocide, a slave market, a string of installed dictators. “We were preventing something worse” is the defense that excuses everything; the aftermath is where it is tested, and usually convicted.
One fence runs through every page in this hub. The record is damning on its own, from America's own files, so it needs no exaggeration — and exaggeration is exactly what discredits it. We grade what is documented as fact, mark what is contested as contested, name the viral list's category errors (South Korea 1945 was not a coup; Venezuela 2026 hasn't finished happening), and hold the hardest line of all: criticizing US foreign policy is not anti-Americanism, and documenting a government's record using that government's own declassified words is accountability, not an attack.
Investigations in this hub
Each is a self-contained, graded ledger — the coups, the funded elections, and the aftermath — three views of a single behavior.
The Coup Ledger
A graded, tiered answer to the viral montage of US-backed coups, built to beat it on both completeness and rigor. FACT (the scale): the authoritative account is Lindsey O'Rourke's 'Covert Regime Change: America's Secret Cold War' (Cornell University Press, 2018), built from the National Archives and presidential libraries, which documents 72 US regime-change attempts during the Cold War alone (1947-1989) — 64 covert and 6 overt, meaning the US was about ten times more likely to try to topple a government secretly than openly; a separate peer-reviewed study by Dov Levin counts at least 81 US interventions in foreign elections from 1946 to 2000; neither figure includes the pre-1947 banana-war era or the post-1991 wars, so the real list runs well past the reel's 33. FACT (the declassified spine): coups the US government's own records now confirm — Iran 1953 (Operation Ajax, CIA acknowledged in 2013 declassifications), Guatemala 1954 (PBSuccess against the elected Árbenz), Chile 1973 (Church Committee and declassified files on years of covert action against Allende), Congo 1960-61 (Church Committee plots against Lumumba), Brazil 1964 (Operation Brother Sam), Indonesia 1965 (embassy cables and kill lists passed to the army), Cuba 1961 (Bay of Pigs). FACT (the overt tier, done in daylight): Hawaii 1893 (US Marines backed the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani; Congress apologized in the 1993 Apology Resolution, Public Law 103-150), Dominican Republic 1965, Panama 1989, Iraq 2003, Libya 2011. FACT (the banana-war decades): serial Marine invasions and occupations of Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Mexico (Veracruz 1914) between 1898 and 1934. SOME SMOKE (the contested tier): cases where the US role is documented as support, encouragement, or foreknowledge rather than authorship — Argentina 1976 is firmly tied to US backing through the Operation Condor files but was executed by Argentine officers, and Syria, Ecuador, Bolivia and Ghana 1966 sit on a spectrum from well-documented to plausibly-alleged; we grade these down rather than flatten them to 'the US did it.' FALSE / MISLEADING (the reel's errors): South Korea 1945 was liberation-and-occupation after Japan's surrender, not a US coup; Afghanistan in the 1980s was Operation Cyclone, an anti-Soviet proxy war, not a US-installed government; and Venezuela 2026 is an ongoing event, not a completed regime change — padding a true pattern with soft entries is how critics wave the whole thing away. The honest fence: a coup is not an invasion is not an election intervention is not a proxy war, and the widely cited figure of nearly 400 US military interventions is the Congressional Research Service's tally of all armed deployments abroad — a broader category than regime change. We keep the buckets separate on purpose, because the regime-change record alone is damning enough that it does not need to borrow from the others. The hardest question: if a peer-reviewed dataset counts 72 regime-change attempts in just the Cold War, who benefits from a public that remembers only the famous handful as exceptions rather than the method?
The Blowback Ledger
The companion to The Coup Ledger, grading not what the United States did to other governments but whether it worked — measured against each intervention's own stated goal. FACT: 'blowback' is the CIA's own term, coined in a classified March 1954 history of the 1953 Iran coup and popularized by Chalmers Johnson's 2000 book, naming the unintended consequences of covert action that come home. FACT (the founding case): the 1953 Iran coup replaced elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh with the Shah's absolute monarchy and its torture police SAVAK, and produced — 26 years later — the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the embassy hostage crisis, and the theocratic Islamic Republic that has been Washington's principal Middle East adversary ever since. FACT (with a precision caveat): through Operation Cyclone the CIA funneled billions in arms and money via Pakistan's ISI to the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviets, and that war's networks and veterans fed into al-Qaeda and the conditions for the Taliban and, ultimately, 9/11 — though the common shorthand 'the US armed the Taliban' is not literally accurate, since the Taliban formed in 1994 after Cyclone ended and was not US-funded. FACT: the 2003 Iraq invasion, sold on weapons of mass destruction never found, disbanded the army and imposed de-Baathification that fed the insurgency, triggered a sectarian civil war that killed hundreds of thousands, and produced the vacuum from which al-Qaeda in Iraq evolved into ISIS. FACT: the 2011 US-backed NATO overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi produced state collapse, rival governments, a decade of militia war, and open-air markets where migrants were auctioned as slaves (documented by CNN in 2017), an aftermath Obama called the worst mistake of his presidency. FACT: the Cold War installs replaced flawed or elected governments with killers — Guatemala 1954 opened a 36-year civil war in which a UN truth commission found roughly 200,000 killed or disappeared, 83% of them indigenous Maya, and formally found genocide; Congo 1960-61 cleared the path for Mobutu's 32-year kleptocracy; Chile 1973 installed Pinochet (3,000+ killed or disappeared); and the US-backed Nicaraguan Contra war killed an estimated 30,000. THE HONEST FENCE: 'arguably as bad or worse' is a graded judgment, not a slogan — some targets genuinely were authoritarian (Saddam, Gaddafi), blowback is about consequences set in motion rather than a claim the US personally committed every later atrocity, and the pattern is not universal (there are closer calls, and a full ledger should grade each). What survives the caveats is the recurring, documented irony: interventions justified as stopping tyranny and chaos routinely installed tyranny and produced chaos, and failed on the very terms their architects named. The hardest question: 'we were preventing something worse' can never be disproven in the moment, but it can be checked against what actually happened — and when the results are a theocracy, ISIS, a genocide, and a slave market, the burden of proof flips.
The Ballot-Box Ledger
The election-meddling spoke of The Interventionist's Ledger, graded with a hard precision fence. FACT: the political scientist Dov Levin assembled the first systematic database of great-power electoral interference and counted 117 interventions by the United States and the USSR/Russia between 1946 and 2000, of which 81 were carried out by the United States — more than any other country, making the US the most prolific election-meddler of the era; Levin himself has made the hypocrisy point that the country now most alarmed about foreign interference has the longest record of doing it. FACT: the CIA's first major covert operation was the 1948 Italian election, funneling millions of dollars (some of it captured wartime funds laundered through private accounts) to the Christian Democrats to defeat the Communist-Socialist bloc, with covert US aid to Italian parties continuing at roughly $5 million a year into the early 1960s, per a Defense Department study released by the National Security Archive in 2017. FACT: through the 1960s the CIA funded and propagandized to keep socialist Salvador Allende out of Chile's presidency (documented by the US Senate's Church Committee) before the covert effort escalated into the 1973 coup; and the CIA secretly financed Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party through the 1950s and 1960s, confirmed by declassified documents and reported by The New York Times in 1994. FACT (with a graded caveat): in 1996 the United States backed Boris Yeltsin's re-election with open endorsement, a well-timed $10.2 billion IMF loan, and American campaign consultants — though the stronger claim that the US decisively rigged the election is graded SOME SMOKE, since this was mostly overt great-power support rather than covert vote-fixing. SOME SMOKE: after the Cold War much of the covert election work migrated into the open through bodies like the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID programs, which supporters call legitimate democracy assistance and critics call soft regime-shaping (Nicaragua 1990 the clearest tilt) — a case-by-case judgment we pose rather than flatten. THE KEY FENCE: foreign-government election interference is categorically different from domestic lobbying by a country's own citizens — including foreign-aligned lobbies like AIPAC, which raise real money-and-influence questions but belong to a separate conversation (our Israeli Influence lane) with separate law; the apples-to-apples comparison to US behavior abroad is what other states do, and keeping the two apart is what makes the hypocrisy charge precise enough to be unanswerable. This is NOT whataboutism: condemning Russia's 2016 interference is correct, two governments can both be wrong, and the narrow point is that the US lacks the clean hands and standing it claims — the record forbids the clean hands, not the condemnation. The hardest question: if interfering in a democratic election is an attack on democracy, what is the name for doing it 81 times, and why does that name never get used at home?
Questions worth taking seriously
Isn't a hub like this just anti-American?
It's built almost entirely from American sources — the CIA's own declassified histories, the US Senate's Church Committee, the congressional resolution apologizing for Hawaii, and peer-reviewed data by US and allied scholars. Documenting what a government did, using that government's own records, is accountability, not an attack. The genuinely unpatriotic move is the opposite: insisting a superpower with this record has clean hands, which leaves the public unable to recognize the next intervention when it's sold to them. We also correct the exaggerations, because an honest ledger is far more powerful than an angry one.
Weren't many of these justified by the Cold War, or by removing real dictators?
Some were contested calls against a real adversary, and some targets were genuinely brutal — we say so on the pages. But two things survive that defense. First, the targets were often elected or nationalist, not Soviet puppets or tyrants: Mossadegh, Árbenz, Allende were removed for nationalizing resources or leaning left. Second, even where the target was bad, the test is whether the intervention delivered something better — and the blowback ledger shows it usually delivered something worse. “We had a reason,” “we hid it from our own people,” and “it ended in catastrophe” can all be true at once, and the ledger holds all three.
Why is election meddling in the same hub as coups? Aren't they different?
They're different methods aimed at the same end: a government the US prefers. A coup removes a leader; a funded election prevents one from winning; a proxy war arms someone else to do it. Keeping them distinct matters for grading each honestly — and we're careful that a foreign government meddling in an election is a different thing from a domestic lobby, which belongs in another lane. But at the level of the behavior they're one story, which is why they sit together: the overthrow is the loud version and the funded election is the quiet one.
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