Forty-five years ago, on November 11, 1975, the Labor prime minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, was removed from office by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr. With Whitlam gone, Kerr then “prorogued” — dissolved — parliament and appointed the conservative opposition leader, Malcolm Fraser, in his place. When new elections came around six weeks later, the caretaker Liberal government won in a landslide. The event, known as “the Dismissal” in Australia, was a soft coup.

A defining moment in Australia’s modern history, it is also part of Cold War history — the final event in a series of US interventions that began in earnest in 1953–4, with coups against the reformist Jacobo Árbenz government of Guatemala and the elected Mohammad Mosaddegh government of Iran. The bloodiness of such events varied with the terrain — from political mass murder in Indonesia in 1965 to genocide in Guatemala over decades — and the place of the Dismissal in this sequence is easy to miss because of its bloodlessness. But its significance cannot be overstated, for it is the moment in Cold War history when the US government schemed, prodded, and nudged its way to removing a mildly inconvenient government.