Perilous Partners: The Benefits and Pitfalls of America's Alliances with Authoritarian Regimes.

• Author: Coyne, Christopher J.
• Position: Book review

* Perilous Partners: The Benefits and Pitfalls of America's Alliances with Authoritarian Regimes

By Ted Galen Carpenter and Malou Innocent

Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2015.

Pp. ix, 597. $24.95 cloth.

Over the past several years, the U.S. government has extended its counterterrorism efforts into Africa and partnered with several governments in the region. These partnerships typically involve the host government granting permission for the United States to carry out military and drone operations in the region. In return, the U.S. government has provided a variety of aid-money, weapons, equipment-to its host governments while also looking the other way regarding human rights abuses. Such arrangements create a fundamental tension between two tenets of U.S. foreign policy-U.S. national security on the one hand and the advancement of global human rights on the other. More often than not, members of the U.S. government choose to enter into arrangements with unsavory despots to advance the former goal while directly undermining the second. A senior official succinctly captured the existing approach, noting that "[t]he countries that cooperate with us get at least a free pass [regarding human rights abuses].... Whereas other countries that don't cooperate, we ream them as best we can" (quoted in Craig Whidock, "Niger Rapidly Emerging as a Key U.S. Partner," Washington Post, April 14, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/ world/national-security/niger-rapidly-emerging-as-a-key-us-partner/2013/ 04/14/3d3b260c-a38c-lIe2-ac00-8ef7caef5e00_story.html). This fundamental tension is at the heart of Ted Galen Carpenter and Malou Innocent's important book Perilous Partners.

Carpenter and Innocent point out that this tension existed well before the current war on terror and can be traced back several decades to the early days of the Cold War. And, of course, relationships with authoritarian despots existed before the Cold War-for example, with the Soviet Union during World War II-but such Cold War partnerships became a normalized part of U.S. foreign policy. As part of its Cold War strategy, the U.S. government established a network of client states, controlled by some of the worst governments in the world, to attempt to counter the Soviet Union's influence. This normalization resulted in what the authors refer to as the "ethical rot" of U.S. foreign policy because the partnerships undertaken in the name of promoting liberty, democratic governance, and free...