Ensuring US government dominance over the Caribbean, containing Soviet and Cuban government influence in the region, and reasserting US military capabilities to a domestic audience still traumatised by Vietnam.

Grenada was a former colony of the British government and in the 1970’s was under the dictatorship of Sir Eric Gairy. He was overthrown by a Communist revolution by the New Jewel Movement (NJM) in 1979. The US government (Jimmy Carter administration) was worried about this because it was feared that a Communist Grenada would provide a base for the Cuban and Soviet regimes to spread their influence in the region. Allegedly, the CIA was tasked with destabilising the new regime of Maurice Bishop, including a failed assassination attempt in 1980. I don’t know how true this is, though - I’ve not found any definitive evidence on it myself, and the sources which do say it seem, or are, pro-NJM so might have a motive in pushing that narrative, true or not (Campbell, 1984: 5; Grenada Newsletter, 1980: 3).

Anyway, by 1983 internal problems and divisions in the NJM boiled to the surface. The leader, Maurice Bishop, was placed under house arrest by the movement’s Marxist-Leninist wing, his supporters rallied to rescue him, the army started shooting people (including killing Bishop), and General Hudson Austin of the Grenadian military took power, putting the nation into lockdown. There were a number of US students on the island, and their safety would provide the public justification for a US government invasion.

But there was much more than that. The 1980’s were a time of Neoconservatives in government (an imperialist brand of nationalism and conservatism born mainly in response to the defeat in Vietnam and progressive societal changes which advocated for the US government to exert its dominance across the world through military force if necessary for the “good” of all). Many Neocons believed that the Soviet regime’s global dominance ambitions were a dire threat to core American values like freedom and democracy which had to be proactively dealt with by asserting the power of the US government and military (Nuechterlein, 1996: 14; Kagan, 2008: 14-15). This was especially true post-Vietnam, when there was an overriding feeling that US government foreign policy should be less interventionist, which Neocons saw as dangerous to the US government’s global position.

Ronald Reagan, who took power in 1980, was part of this crowd. He was a nationalist and believed that the American people had to collectively “find” themselves again, so to speak, following a period of isolationist sympathies post-Vietnam. As he put it: ‘For those who have abandoned hope, we’ll restore hope and we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again!’ (Reagan, 1980). Part of this involved making military intervention and a more aggressive anti-Soviet regime posture more palatable to the US public in order to promote national confidence and the nation’s military capabilities. This would involve intervening across the world in areas where US government interests were at stake, but without getting embroiled in another Vietnam-style war (Winnefeld et al., 1994: 10).

The first military intervention was in the Lebanese Civil War in 1982 to try to stabilise the situation and keep the Syrian regime (and thus its Soviet regime ally) from gaining too much influence in the country. The second intervention was Grenada in 1983 following the overthrow of Maurice Bishop.

A week before Bishop was executed, the US government had already decided that the coup against him made Grenadian internal politics too unstable for their comfort (especially insofar as the Soviet regime was concerned) and so they began putting a plan together for military invasion (Cole, 1997: 11-12). They’d also been requested to do so by Sir Paul Scoon, the Governor-General of the nation who’d been appointed by Elizabeth II of the UK - as Grenada was in the Commonwealth, Elizabeth was its queen (Martin, 2013).

That military plan came into effect two weeks later, with US and several Caribbean nations’ military forces invading the island and occupying it fully after 4 days.

A US National Security Council member described that the invasion was akin to letting off some steam for Reagan, as he ‘felt, whether consciously or unconsciously, that America was being kicked around as it had been when Carter was in charge. And at a moment where, perhaps, further thought should have been given to what he was going to do, as he struggled mainly to cope with Beirut where he could not react, it crystallized in his mind that here he bloody well could react - and would’. There seemed to have been a short-lived measure of success on the Neocon front: polling showed that Americans found some sense of national confidence in Grenada, as it was shown that the US military could undertake action on foreign soil while taking relatively few casualties and achieving success (Lewis, 1999: 111-112; Kenworthy, 1984: 636).

However, within a month, Reagan’s popularity was back to pre-invasion levels (below 50%) while those Americans who felt Reagan’s actions increased the threat of a larger war stayed at 55% for a full three months after the conflict (Kenworthy, 1984: 648).

Foreign military supplies to Grenada were seized by the occupying US forces, showing the extent to which the Cuban, USSR, and North Korean regimes had been working to increase their influence in the region, though it was not quite as much as the US government had suspected. Moreover, 800 Cubans sent as construction workers were on the island at the time of the invasion, and previous US government fears of Cuban military involvement in Grenada turned out to be misplaced - it was believed the island nation would be garrisoned by over 6,000 Cubans, but it actually turned out from captured documents etc. that the Grenadian Army was to be raised to this number. Some useful intelligence did come to help the US government’s position, though, such as indications that the Soviet government were sending more weapons to their allies in Nicaragua than previously believed, and that Cuban “construction workers” should always be counted as well-trained combatants in places where the US military might move against next, as they had done the majority of the fighting against the US military’s invasion (CIA, 1983: 2).

The US government considered that they’d successfully countered a possible threat to their regional/global position in invading Grenada and, from a PR standpoint, had a victory in that they rescued all of their students. Sir Paul Scoon was reinstated to his position having been placed under house arrest in the recent upheaval, and a government more aligned with US government interests was established soon afterwards.

I hope this helped!