Una crisi "speciale"? I rapporti anglo-americani e l'invasione di Grenada

The essay analyzes the 1983 US invasion of Grenada in a historical and diplomatic perspective. For more than two centuries, the small Caribbean island had been a colony of the British Empire. In the 1980s it was still part of the British Commonwealth of Nations and formally ruled by the British Crown. The US invasion aimed to prevent a supposed-irreversible rooting of communism throughout the island, but mostly embarrassed the British government, provoking a short-term crisis for the Anglo-American “special relationship”. The paper claims that the US invasion had its historical roots in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which proclaimed the undisputed US hegemony over the Americas, particularly towards the Central American and Caribbean backyard. Through diplomatic documents, memoirs, diaries, speeches and literature, the essay analyzes in an East-West perspective the reasons leading to the 1983 invasion, the reaction of the British government, the lack of consultations between the Anglo-American allies, the US attempts to solve the bilateral crisis and concludes by evaluating its international consequences.