When Helping Allies Hurts

"Up in Arms

Adam E. Casey

Basic, 336 pages, $32

American military aid to friendly authoritarian governments has long been the subject of dispute. On the American left, military aid is distasteful because it's, well, military. The high-minded across the spectrum think authoritarians shouldn't have arms because they're, well, authoritarian. And politicians aligned with Donald Trump don't like much of anything foreign.

In fact, however, military aid to friendly governments, authoritarian or not, is eminently appropriate when it serves American national-security interests. Historically, the U.S. and our allies haven't provided assistance, military or economic, from the goodness of our hearts but on the utilitarian calculus of what benefited our cause. Franklin D. Roosevelt sent U.S. vehicles to Moscow so that Soviet troops could fight the Nazis. "If Hitler invaded hell," Winston Churchill famously said, "I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons."

In "Up in Arms," Adam E. Casey assesses whether American and Soviet military assistance to authoritarian client regimes, mostly during the Cold War, accomplished its aims. The book is a methodical study that largely avoids moral posturing, especially about U.S. policies and decisions. That alone justifies taking it seriously. "Up in Arms," moreover, is apposite to the moment: As tensions and conflict rise between the evolving Beijing-Moscow axis (and outriders like Iran and North Korea) and the American-led West, knowing what worked and what didn't during the Cold War is hardly academic.

Mr. Casey's unexpected conclusion is that the Soviet Union's military aid was more effective than American aid on the critical issue of authoritarian regime stability. U.S. military aid, under all presidents, typically sought to replicate our army's model: professional and depoliticized. That often had unintended consequences. "Building powerful, autonomous, and professional militaries dramatically upset the balance of power between dictators and their security apparatus," Mr. Casey writes. By increasing the relative power of the army and its commanders, we unintentionally destabilized dictators we were trying to help. Serial coups d'etat followed in country after country, at least until many democratized.

By contrast, Mr. Casey writes, Soviet assistance "sponsored the subordination of the army to the ruling regime by thoroughly politicizing the military." Employing strategies the Bolsheviks used on the czarist army they inherited, Moscow helped Soviet-aligned regimes develop Communist Party-style political commissars in the military and independent counterintelligence units to gather information not about foreign opponents but about regime adversaries. The result: "Not a single Soviet client regime fell to a military coup."

Mr. Casey, an "analyst in the United States government," as the book's dust jacket cryptically puts it, assembles ample historical data to support these central conclusions, although a number of his judgments are open to contrary views. Idiosyncratic realities like Jimmy Carter's weak leadership and the consequent losses of Iran and Nicaragua, for example, don't figure significantly in the book. Mr. Casey acknowledges that implementation of U.S. and U.S.S.R. paradigms varied in completeness from country to country and that success or failure was a matter of degree, not an absolute.

His point is sound, however: America long failed to consider adequately the effects of large military-aid programs on the stability of the regimes it was assisting. We were aware of the issue, from Vietnam's repetitive military coups in the 1960s to Afghanistan's instability in the 2000s, but we failed to mitigate the effects of our destabilizing programs, or worsened them. Changing the internal balance of power (also possible through substantial economic aid) may be inevitable. There is no real-world aid mechanism that would be entirely neutral for the recipient's domestic political calculus. Mr. Casey isn't recommending that the U.S. adopt Soviet principles in military aid, but he does recognize that valuable U.S. allies don't necessarily follow Marquess of Queensberry norms.

In addition to regime stability, Mr. Casey identifies three other typical objectives of U.S. military assistance: international alignment with the U.S., military effectiveness and democratization. (Moscow didn't trouble itself with that messy final objective.) While these are all sensible and legitimate, the first was Washington's main objective in almost all country-assistance programs. If this top priority proves unattainable, the others are essentially irrelevant. Mr. Casey documents that in "three-quarters of cases where an allied authoritarian government fell, the subsequent regime retained US alignment."

Not bad for government work. Future contests with the China-Russia axis, however, will not likely replicate Cold War patterns and could make future military aid more difficult to implement and measure. But we surely want to enhance our alignment batting average by minimizing the fallout from the instability caused by our own programs' untoward consequences. Since our success in enhancing the military effectiveness of our authoritarian military-aid recipients is precisely what makes those armies more threatening to their authoritarian overlords, national security officials will have to learn how better to mitigate the tension.

On democratization, Mr. Casey's conclusion will cause heartburn in both academic and Trumpian circles: "Democracy spread through the world after the Cold War not because the US finally learned how to effectively promote it. It spread because of unipolarity in the international system." As America's unipolar moment fades, because too many Republicans and Democrats alike are unwilling to sustain it, the opposite outcome is almost certain. The effectiveness of U.S. aid to foreign authoritarians will therefore grow in importance, not decline.

Wishful thinkers will doubtless continue arguing that we overemphasize hard-power capabilities and relationships in formulating American national security. But as we've had many occasions to recall lately -- Iran's "ring of fire" strategy against Israel, China's threats against Taiwan and menacing in the South China Sea -- hard power still matters most. The world is not yet a Disney-style Fantasyland where soft power carries the day." [1]

1. When Helping Allies Hurts. Bolton, John.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 16 May 2024: A.13.