Synopses & Reviews
In May 2003, President George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq. But while we won the war, we catastrophically lost the peace. Our failure prompted a fundamental change in our foreign policy. Confronted with the shortcomings of "shock and awe," the U.S. military shifted its focus to "stability operations": counterinsurgency and the rebuilding of failed states. In less than a decade, foreign assistance has become militarized; humanitarianism has been armed.
Combining recent history and firsthand reporting, Armed Humanitarians traces how the concepts of nation-building came into vogue, and how, evangelized through think tanks, government seminars, and the press, this new doctrine took root inside the Pentagon and the State Department. Following this extraordinary experiment in armed social work as it plays out from Afghanistan and Iraq to Africa and Haiti, Nathan Hodge exposes the difficulties of translating these ambitious new theories into action.
Ultimately seeing this new era in foreign relations as a noble but flawed experiment, he shows how armed humanitarianism strains our resources, deepens our reliance on outsourcing and private contractors, and leads to perceptions of a new imperialism, arguably a major factor in any number of new conflicts around the world. As we attempt to build nations, we may in fact be weakening our own.
Nathan Hodge is a Washington, D.C.-based writer who specializes in defense and national security. He has reported from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, and a number of other countries in the Middle East and former Soviet Union. He is the author, with Sharon Weinberger, of A Nuclear Family Vacation, and his work has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and many other newspapers and magazines.
Review
“Drawing on an enormous amount of location research in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, the Republic of Georgia, and elsewhere, Hodge exhibits a startling grasp of the primary challenges to our national security… Equal parts inspiring and frustrating, this is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand U.S. foreign policy.” —
Booklist “In his fast-moving, well-argued assessment, [Hodge] warns about a military stretched too thin, distracted from its primary mission of fighting and winning wars; about a U.S. treasury strained to the breaking point; and about the huge and clumsy footprint often left by the new class of soldier/diplomats. For a civilian readership increasingly alienated from the culture of its military, Hodge provides an important guide to what the reformers have wrought.” —
Kirkus Reviews“Hodge calls for a national conversation on the issue of nation building, and his carefully reported and sprightly written critique is a good place to begin.” —Publishers Weekly“An important, timely book: Nathan Hodge, one of the nations best defense reporters, tells a compelling story about U.S. soft power, showing how military force and humanitarian aid has coalesced during missions abroad. A must read.” —Tara McKelvey, author of Monstering: Inside Americas Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War
“A fascinating and important first-hand account of the new American way of war.” —Sean Naylor, author of Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda“A fascinating and alarming examination of one of the least explored trends in American policy: the militarization of foreign aid. As Hodge powerfully illustrates with a storyteller's eye for detail, time and again in recent years the American military has been called to a task it is ill-equipped to perform—nation-building—with disastrous consequences. In the process, the work of 'bona-fide' civilian foreign assistance workers has become infinitely more suspect, complicated and perilous. An indispensable guide for anyone who wises to understand the terrible price being paid for the outsourcing of American foreign policy.” —Scott Anderson, author of The Man Who Tried to Save the World
Review
"In the first 11 months of its Iraq deployment, the Fourth Infantry Division's Third Brigade Combat Team spent $72 million on public works projects in just one Baghdad suburb. That's roughly equivalent to one year of U.S. foreign aid to the entire country of Botswana, but merely a rounding error in the U.S. military's massive outlay of development dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Armed Humanitarians, freelance defense correspondent Nathan Hodge sets out to explain how and why the Pentagon embraced the once-dreaded business of nation-building, and the 'tectonic shift' that this new mission portends for American foreign policy. Hint: It's not good news."
James Gibney, The Wilson Quarterly (Read the entire )
Synopsis
In May 2003, President George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq. But while we won the war, we catastrophically lost the peace. Our failure prompted a fundamental change in our foreign policy: confronted with the shortcomings of "shock and awe," the U.S. military shifted its focus to "stability operations," counterinsurgency and the rebuilding of failed states. In less than a decade, foreign assistance has become militarized; humanitarianism has been armed. Our armed forces became a Peace Corps with precision munitions.
Combining recent history and firsthand reporting, Armed Humanitarians traces how the concepts of nation-building came into vogue, and how, evangelized through think tanks, government seminars, and the press, this new doctrine took root inside the Pentagon and the State Department. It also tells the story of this extraordinary experiment in armed social work, the defining experience for a generation of U.S. foreign policy practitioners.
Nathan Hodge reveals the difficulties of translating these ambitious new theories into action — straining our resources and driving further reliance on outsourcing and private contractors — and explains how this strategy has led to perceptions of a new imperialism, endangering our already diminished standing in the world.
This important book will shed light on the new era of foreign policy as a noble but flawed experiment: as we attempt to build nations, we may ultimately be weakening our own.
About the Author
Nathan Hodge is a Washington, D.C.-based writer who specializes in defense and national security. He has reported from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, and a number of other countries in the Middle East and former Soviet Union. His work has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and many other newspapers and magazines.