There is a particular kind of arrogance that only empires possess—the serene confidence that their crimes are not crimes at all, but services rendered to civilisation. The United States of America has perfected this arrogance into an art form, wrapping its interventions in the language of democracy promotion while leaving behind a trail of coups, corpses, and client states stretching across seven decades and six continents.

The record is not hidden. It is catalogued in declassified documents, Senate committee reports, and the memoirs of the very operatives who carried it out. What is remarkable is not the evidence—it is that the evidence changes almost nothing.

To understand American interventionism, one must first understand its operating logic. The United States does not seek territory in the old colonial manner. It seeks something more sophisticated and more durable: compliance. Compliant governments keep markets open, military bases available, and dissent manageable. When governments prove non-compliant—regardless of how democratically elected they may be—the machinery of American power shifts into elimination mode.

That machinery has a name: the Central Intelligence Agency, established in 1947, the same year the Cold War framework gave Washington a permanent ideological alibi for every intervention it would ever conduct.

Jacobo Árbenz was elected President of Guatemala in 1950 with 65 per cent of the vote. His crime was land reform—specifically, redistributing uncultivated land, including holdings of the United Fruit Company, an American corporation with deep connections to the Eisenhower administration. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had been a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm that served as legal counsel to United Fruit. His brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, sat on its board.

In 1954, the CIA’s Operation PBSUCCESS overthrew Árbenz and installed the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas. What followed was four decades of US-backed military governance, death squads, and civil war. The UN-backed Commission for Historical Clarification, reporting in 1999, documented over 2,00,000 deaths, with State forces responsible for 93 per cent of the atrocities. The commission explicitly identified the US role in creating the conditions for genocide.

The previous year, the CIA had already rehearsed its playbook in Iran. Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, named Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1951, had committed the unforgivable act of nationalising Iran’s oil industry, then controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company—later BP.

Operation AJAX, jointly run by the CIA and British intelligence, engineered street riots, bribed military officers, and toppled Mosaddegh. The Shah was restored to absolute power. In 2013, the CIA formally acknowledged its role. The blowback from that intervention—the Shah’s brutal SAVAK secret police, the revolutionary fury it generated—produced the 1979 Islamic Revolution, a direct ancestor of every US-Iran crisis since.

The cost: Iranian democratic development permanently derailed. Six decades of regional instability. And oil contracts, restored.

Today, Washington has exposed itself further by irrationally aligning with Israel in its assault on Iran, thereby helping intensify a conflict that threatens to destabilise the world economy and could cost millions of lives.

Salvador Allende won Chile’s 1970 presidential election legitimately. He was a socialist. He was also the nightmare scenario for Henry Kissinger, who said of Chile: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

The US spent three years destabilising Chile’s economy—what Nixon called “making the economy scream”—before General Augusto Pinochet’s coup on September 11, 1973. Allende died in the presidential palace. What followed was 17 years of torture, disappearances, and murder.

The official Chilean count records 3,065 killed or disappeared. Amnesty International estimates tens of thousands were tortured. Kissinger, who coordinated US support for the coup, received the Nobel Peace Prize the same year.

Less discussed in Western memory is Indonesia. When General Suharto moved against President Sukarno in 1965, the CIA provided lists of Communist Party members to the Indonesian military. What followed was one of the 20th century’s worst mass killings: between 5,00,000 and one million people murdered in months. The US Embassy in Jakarta later acknowledged that American officials had supplied these lists. Suharto ruled for 31 years as a reliable American partner, presiding over the occupation of and atrocities in East Timor, which claimed an estimated 1,00,000–1,80,000 lives.

Independent investigations later showed that between 1947 and 1989, the US launched or attempted at least 64 covert and six overt regime-change operations, the vast majority through the CIA, across Latin America, Africa, West Asia, and Asia.

The pattern is not coincidental. It is policy.

Through every one of these interventions, the language remained remarkably consistent: democracy, freedom, stability, the rules-based international order. The alibi does not change because it does not need to. It is not aimed at historians. It is aimed at domestic publics who need reassurance that their government is the good guy, and at allied governments who need political cover to go along.

The alibi works because American media, academic institutions, and political culture have largely internalised American exceptionalism as axiomatic—the baseline assumption from which all foreign policy commentary proceeds. Interventions are called “mistakes” rather than crimes. Their architects receive presidential medals and endowed chairs rather than indictments.

India’s moment of submission

Which brings us to India—and to the particular quality of the current Indian government’s capitulation before Washington’s demands.

The pattern has become difficult to ignore. The Modi government, which entered power on a thunderous nationalist mandate—Bharat Mata Ki Jai [Victory to Mother India], civilisational pride, strategic autonomy—has, in practice, steadily oriented India closer to American strategic preferences. The prosecution of Canadian Sikh activists, the pressure around the Ukraine vote, the progressive softening of India’s traditional non-alignment: each episode reveals a government whose nationalism is more performative than substantive when Washington actually leans.

Critics across India’s political spectrum have noted the irony: a government that invokes Hindutva and civilisational pride with great frequency has proved surprisingly accommodating to the very Western liberal order it rhetorically contests. The explanation offered by analysts on the Indian left is structural—that the Brahminical ideological tradition, from which the RSS-BJP ecosystem draws its deepest intellectual roots, was historically concerned not with the exercise of political power but with its ideological legitimation. The kshatriya [warrior] wields the sword; the brahmin [priest] determines its direction. Political sovereignty, in this framework, is less sacred than cultural supremacy.

Whether or not one accepts that specific cultural argument, the political observation stands independently: the Modi government has chosen economic integration with the American-led order—tech investment, defence contracts, diaspora remittances, Washington’s imprimatur in great-power competition with China—over the kind of genuinely autonomous foreign policy that Nehru, and even Vajpayee, attempted to maintain. The price of that integration is compliance. And compliance, as the countries above learned at devastating cost, is precisely what Washington demands.

The US has never truly been held to account for its crimes—whether in Nicaragua, Chile, Indonesia, or Iraq. Its wars, coups, and covert devastations have passed not into judgement but into official memory, often rewritten as strategy, necessity, or even virtue. That impunity is not a defect of American power; it is one of its defining features: the ability to inflict violence and still control the story told about it.

For countries like India, the real question is whether they will act as sovereign powers or settle for the comfort of clienthood. Washington treats its clients well only so long as they remain useful. Others learned that truth in blood. India still has the option of learning it before the price is exacted. Whether its present rulers possess that degree of independence remains deeply doubtful.

Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO of Petronet India Limited (PIL), a professor at IIT Kharagpur and Goa Institute of Management, a civil rights activist, and the author of over 30 books.

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