In the wake of the accusations that the Russian government worked with Julian Assange to release e-mails from Democratic Party members before the November election, many journalists, scholars, and politicians have pointed out how the United States has its own sordid history of foreign intervention.

They have rightfully drawn attention to a number of episodes that took place during the Cold War: the CIA under the Eisenhower administration bombed Guatemalan military facilities and assisted in the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, in 1954; the Nixon administration sought “to make the economy scream” in Chile and the CIA eventually assisted dissident military officers in the coup d’état that deposed Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, in 1973; and the Reagan administration recurrently funded the Contra forces in Nicaragua to destabilize the Sandinista government throughout the 1980s, even after the US Congress passed legislation forbidding it.

Indeed, Lindsey O’Rourke has pointed out that the United States attempted to change a foreign government seventy-two times between 1947 and 1989. And during a Senate Armed Forces Committee hearing on cyber attacks, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) cited additional research on Cold War-era US foreign policy and acknowledged the hypocrisy of the United States in criticizing Russia for its alleged intervention, stating that “we live in a big glass house and there are a lot of rocks to throw.”