The Gangster State
Look back, A retrospective.
Image: Project 2025 bound publication. Source: https://archive.org/details/2025-mandate-for-leadership-full_20240712
In August 1953, the streets of Tehran filled before dawn. Trucks rolled in first—men in plain clothes standing in the back, gripping the sides as the vehicles lurched through the narrow streets. Some carried clubs. Some carried rifles. By afternoon the crowds had swelled, slogans rising against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. By nightfall the army had turned. The prime minister’s house burned, the government collapsed, and the Shah—who had fled the country only days earlier—returned to his throne.
No American flag flew above the city that day. But the cables had already been written in Washington.
A year later the same quiet choreography unfolded again, this time in Central America. Over Guatemala in June 1954, small planes appeared in the sky—unmarked, circling low. They dropped bombs and leaflets over the capital. On the radio came reports of an invading army marching toward the city. The force was small, poorly equipped, but the illusion was enough. Within days President Jacobo Árbenz resigned, his land reform government collapsing under pressure that had begun not in Guatemala City but thousands of miles north.
The pattern became familiar.
In Southeast Asia it did not unfold in whispers but in thunder. Helicopters beating the humid air over rice fields. B-52 bombers tracing long shadows across the jungles of Vietnam. Villages burned, cities shelled, young Americans drafted and sent across the Pacific to fight a war that stretched year after year until the last helicopters lifted from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1975.
Elsewhere the interventions came again in quieter forms.
In Santiago in September 1973, the Chilean presidential palace filled with smoke as fighter jets screamed overhead and rockets slammed into the stone façade. President Salvador Allende spoke one last time on the radio before the military seized power.
In the mountains of Nicaragua during the 1980s, insurgents trained and armed with American support crossed the border to wage a shadow war against the Sandinista government.
And then, decades later, after the towers fell in New York, the reach extended even further. Columns of armored vehicles rolled across the Afghan desert. Baghdad lit the night sky with explosions in 2003. Drones—small, distant, unseen from the ground—circled over villages in Yemen, Pakistan, Haiti, and Somalia.
The scenes were separated by continents and decades.
But the architecture behind them—the cables written in Washington, the intelligence briefings, the quiet authorizations, the machinery of bases, aircraft carriers, covert funding, and satellite surveillance—remained the same.
A system capable of touching almost any place on earth.
And when it moved, governments sometimes fell. Wars sometimes began. Borders sometimes shifted.
Often the world learned about it only after the fact.
A president deposed in Tehran. A reform government collapsing in Guatemala City. A palace burning in Santiago. Helicopters clawing their way off a rooftop in Saigon. Shock and awe over Baghdad and Port au Prince. Drones circling above villages that never appear on most maps.
The pattern repeated often enough that its meaning required no explanation: somewhere far away, the largest power in the world had stepped into the room—like a gangster leaning across the table—reminding everyone who made the rules, and who would pay if they refused them.
Intellectual Map
Knox, Richard H., Paul Dans, and Steven Groves, eds. Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 2025). https://archive.org/details/2025-mandate-for-leadership-full_20240712
Koch, Michael T., and Patricia L. Sullivan. “Military Intervention by Powerful States, 1945–2003.” 2006. PDF file. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael-Koch-5/publication/255588345_Military_Intervention_by_Powerful_States_1945–2003
PBS. “A Chronology of U.S. Military Interventions.” Frontline. Accessed March 3, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/military/etc/cron.html
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. “America’s Wars.” Accessed March 3, 2026. https://department.va.gov/americas-wars/
“U.S. Launched 251 Military Interventions Since 1991 and 469 Since 1798.” MR Online, September 16, 2022. https://mronline.org/2022/09/16/u-s-launched-251-military-interventions-since-1991-and-469-since-1798/
“Foreign Interventions by the United States.” Wikipedia. Last modified 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_United_States
“Lists of Wars Involving the United States.” Wikipedia. Last modified 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_wars_involving_the_United_States
“Timeline of United States Military Operations.” Wikipedia. Last modified 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations
“United States Involvement in Regime Change.” Wikipedia. Last modified 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change