Latin America's experience of the First World War has been the subject of several books and articles in the last few years. These works have been part of both a flurry of scholarship during the Great War's centenary and a proliferation of new research on Latin American international history in the 1910s to 1930s. Some countries in the region, however, have remained at the margins of recent publications. For that reason, H. Micheal Tarver's new book is a welcome addition, as it shines a spotlight on one such case: Venezuela. Tarver focuses his attention on how the war affected Venezuela's bilateral relationship with the United States, presenting the war years as a transformative period.

In telling this story, Tarver sets himself to a fairly straight-forward task. Instead of getting “bogged down in theory and multilayered analysis,” he aims simply to “present the story as events unfolded” (ix). He mostly follows through on this premise; the only theories he engages, mainly in the introduction and conclusion, have to do with caudillismo and types of presidential character. The story that unfolds over five chapters—including two pre-war contextual chapters, two more substantial wartime chapters, and a brief conclusion covering the impact of the Spanish Flu on Venezuela—thus emphasizes how the personalities and political agendas of specific individuals in the United States and Venezuela shaped each country's policies toward the war and toward each other.

US president Woodrow Wilson and Venezuelan president Juan Vicente Gómez, unsurprisingly, get a lot of attention. In the book's conclusion, Tarver suggests that dissonance between these “very independent and strong-willed leaders” was the source of many tensions between two governments that were otherwise becoming more closely aligned (217). He recognizes greater forces at work in the countries’ changing relations as well. Economic calculations feature prominently; Tarver highlights the context of Venezuela's shifts from coffee toward petroleum, and from Europe toward the United States for markets and sources of capital. Other factors mentioned include domestic politics and historical trends in US-Venezuelan relations.

The book's strongest parts are those in which Tarver discusses the Venezuelan side of the story. He provides a thorough narrative of the policies that upheld Venezuelan neutrality throughout the war. Analysis of how the war divided opinion within Venezuela and provided context for the consolidation of Gómez's regime is especially interesting. Tarver cites and quotes Venezuelan scholars throughout these sections. Tarver also quotes from primary sources at length, a practice that sometimes seems unnecessary but nonetheless makes the language of archival sources available to researchers.

The weaknesses of the book mainly have to do with the other half of its title: the treatment of the United States and its policies toward Venezuela and Latin America. Unfortunately, Tarver ignores much of the scholarship that since the 1990s has shaped our understanding of US foreign policy and US-Latin American relations. Indeed, he often relies on old (in some cases, very old) secondary sources. This limits the possibilities for interesting connections within his analysis. The growing literature on how Latin American governments used international cooperation to manage their relations with the United States, for example, goes unheeded. Especially with “suspicious cooperation” in its title, the book could have considered how Venezuela fit into that broader trend. References to recent scholarship on other relevant topics, such as the evolution of the Monroe and Drago Doctrines and US military interventions in the circum-Caribbean during the war years, would have added nuance to Tarver's narrative and explanations of US foreign policy.

Overall, Tarver's book fulfills its goal of telling an accessible story about an understudied episode in the histories of the First World War and US-Latin American relations. He effectively describes the impact that the war and its diplomatic challenges had on Venezuela and its relations with the United States. The impact on US-Latin American relations is, however, left for the readers to decide.