This book offers a new historical synthesis of U.S.-Latin American relations in the twentieth century. One way that Mark T. Gilderhus accomplishes this is by placing his analysis and conclusions in sharp historiographical focus. At times, this takes the form of tweaking his colleagues: "Aided by the advantage of hindsight," (p.32) Gilderhus writes dryly at one point, historians have assessed the policies that constituted dollar diplomacy as failures. His point is that to describe dollar diplomacy as either a success or a failure is neither useful nor particularly probing of the nature of U.S. policy or its results. Here and elsewhere in the narrative, the author is smart, terse, and analytically sharp. Gilderhus is not interested in a revisionist harangue, nor is he concerned with a historical defence of U.S. actions. The approach is realistic; both in the case of dollar diplomacy and more generally, the author is interested in probing the motives for U.S. policies, understanding related Latin American decision-making, then identifying what worked for the U.S., what did not, and why. Like much of U.S. policy in the twentieth century, dollar diplomacy represents a mixed bag of outcomes that includes, most importantly, the implementation of something Gilderhus describes as closely resembling an empire, but, at the same time, Washington's inability to sustain peace, order and predictability.

Order and predictability were at the heart of U.S. policy in Latin America after 1889. This is a recurring theme that helps distinguish the book from other recent syntheses, including Frank Neiss's A Hemisphere To Itself, Lester D. Langley's America and the Americas, and Lars Schoultz's Beneath the United States. Gilderhus begins with the First Pan-American Conference (1889-1890), explores the origins of the American empire, then goes on to discuss differing Republican Party and Democratic Party initiatives before 1930. Because the author is less interested in cultural or ideological themes in U.S.-Latin American relations than in power politics and policy-making, the book tends to emphasize topics that have guided policy-oriented analysis in the past. These include relatively detailed attention to Woodrow Wilson's policy departures, including his Pan-American projects and his wartime efforts to win backing in Latin America, themes that Gilderhus has addressed expertly elsewhere in his writing. The chapter on the 1930s is particularly strong, considering the Good Neighbor Policy as both a contrast to and a form of continuity from previous Republican administration policies. Gilderhus does not try to resolve contradictions inherent to the policy. On the one hand, he argues convincingly that non-intervention was no ruse. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his most important Latin America advisers embraced it in a manner that endorsed political and diplomatic equality among hemispheric nations, while at the same time reducing the reasons for Latin American mistrust of the Americans. On the other hand, Gilderhus notes that in the vacuum created by U.S. military withdrawals and the end of an intervention threat, national guards, police contingents, and constabularies – often U.S.-trained – stepped into positions of power in a manner that quickly entrenched brutal dictatorial regimes.

Gilderhus's section on the Second World War is the best available short discussion of this period in U.S.-Latin American relations. For the early Cold War, the book rightly stresses the new inter-American system and its key instruments, the Rio Pact and the Bogotá Conference. It also explains effectively why American leaders came to consider Latin American politics almost exclusively in a Cold War context. On one of the most infamous of U.S. interventions in Latin America, the 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, the author explains U.S. action effectively but does not stress with sufficient strength the misery that episode inflicted on generations of Guatemalans. Gilderhus rightly identifies Cuba as being at the core of U.S. policies in the late twentieth century. He highlights the failures of the Alliance for Progress and notes the repeated U.S. error of placing too much faith in the receptivity of Latin Americans to U.S. models of reform and political change. For the Kennedy administration, historical lessons from the New Deal era and before suggested a universal applicability of the rule that visionary reform programs could stave off revolution by resolving Latin American political conflicts. The lesson was misguided and, as the author points out, Latin American elites viewed reform quite differently, as a first step toward revolution.

Gilderhus signals the growing links between Latin American militaries and the U.S. government after 1960, and goes into considerable detail in documenting the case of Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup d'état in Chile. Even so, there is too little attention here to the extent of U.S. ideological, military, and economic support for brutal dictatorships. At the same time, Gilderhus probably overemphasizes the significance of Jimmy Carter's human rights policy after 1976, and underestimates the first Bush administration's successful push for a new dollar diplomacy after 1988. Nonetheless, The Second Century is consistently probing, thoughtful, and well-researched -- an outstanding overview of U.S.-Latin American relations in the twentieth century.