Alliance Curse

How America Lost the Third World

Hilton L. Root

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780815775560
• eBook ISBN: 9780815701514
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Alliance Curse, Hilton Root illustrates that recent U.S. foreign policy is too often misguided, resulting in misdirected foreign aid and alliances that stunt political and economic development among partner regimes, leaving America on the wrong side of change. Many alliances with third world dictators, ostensibly of mutual benefit, reduce incentives to govern for prosperity and produce instead political and social instability and economic failure. Yet again, in the war on terror and in the name of preserving global stability, America is backing authoritarian regimes that practice repression and plunder. It is as if the cold war never ended. While espousing freedom and democracy, the U.S. contradicts itself by aiding governments that do not share those values. In addition to undercutting its own stated goal of promoting freedom, America makes the developing world even more wary of its intentions. Yes, the democracy we preach arouses aspirations and attracts immigrants, but those same individuals become our sternest critics; having learned to admire American values, they end up deploring U.S. policies toward their own countries. Long-term U.S. security is jeopardized by a legacy of resentment and distrust. A lliance Curse proposes an analytical foundation for national security that challenges long-held assumptions about foreign affairs. It questions the wisdom of diplomacy that depends on questionable linkages or outdated suppositions. The end of the Soviet Union did not portend the demise of communism, for example. Democracy and socialism are not incompatible systems. Promoting democracy by linking it with free trade risks overemphasizing the latter goal at the expense of the former. The growing tendency to play China against India in an effort to retain American global supremacy will hamper relations with both—an intolerable situation in today's interdependent world. Root buttresses his analysis with case studies of American foreign polic

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Jacket Flap
• Title Page
• Copyright Information
• Table of Contents
• Preface, or the Genesis of a Perspective
• Part 1: The Legacy of the Cold War and Instability in the Twenty-First Century
• Part 2: Alliance Rents and the Economic Failure of Client Regimes
• Part 3: U.S. Security Risks from Failures of Global Economic Development
• Part 4: Lessons Learned
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover