When it came to the story the U.S. news media printed about the Cuban crisis they conveniently failed to mention the Jupiter ICBM's that Kennedy had placed in Turkey along the border of the USSR long before Khrushchev placed ICBM's in Cuba. I was a young Marine along with thousand of others waiting on a ship in Wilmington Harbor for orders for the go ahead for the invasion of Cuba. This was just before cooler heads prevailed. Khrushchev agreed to remove the ICBM's from Cuba and Kennedy agreed to remove the Jupiter ICBM's from along the Turkish border. A fact we were never told in the same way we were lied to about the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. After spending three years in Vietnam, i didn't find out the truth for years until i decided to do my own research. I believe Gorbachev was the last hope for nuclear disarmament. The U.S. as the world's number one military power had no intention of a nuclear disarmament.

Re- 'It is difficult to escape the conclusion that U.S. interventions did not serve U.S. national interests well. They generated needless resentment in the region and called into question the U.S. commitment to democracy and rule of law in international affairs.'

As is, regrettably, applicable in the Middle-East.

The author neglects the ideological factor in his explanation. He tries to dismiss it at first ("ideological preference, while real, does not help explain why the United States intervened"), but later on attributes the interventions to "domestic political competition and potential future threats" without explaining why these two factors would press for so many interventions. And the explanation is the one he dismissed: ideology. It's fear of "Communism" and protection of "Freedom" (that is, free enterprise, Capitalism).

Also, he puts too much emphasis on the role of the American presidents and congressmen alone, while the governmental non-elected staff (diplomats, strategists, employees of intelligence and other foreign related agencies — like CIA and USAID) are also fundamental to the shaping of the American foreign politics. Here in Brazil a key figure for the American involvement in the coup was Lincoln Gordan, who pressed forward for Washington's support. If we didn't have such a freedom fighter as diplomat in our embassy, maybe the putschists wouldn't have tried the coup.

In sum: Ideology is the key factor to understand the role of those US gov. staff, and they are political actors as much as the American president.

We can see the same thing in the role of Victoria Nuland in Ukraine. These people clearly identify the defense of democracy and freedom with the expansion of US hegemonic power and the fight against anyone who may question it. I'm not sure how much of it is hypocrisy (from conscious but vested interests) and how much is simple naivety, but there is a lot of people pushing for these interventionist policies.