Armed Humanitarians
The Rise of the Nation Builders
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hodge (coauthor of A Nuclear Family Vacation), a journalist specializing in defense and national security issues, takes a critical look at the post-9/11 shift in U.S. foreign policy toward nation building in a timely and balanced account. Drawing upon firsthand reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan and extensive interviews with key figures behind the shift, the author traces how the initial failure to secure Afghanistan and Iraq led to the "military's embrace of counterinsurgency" a shift to "armed social work" that blended force and humanitarianism and became the new face of American foreign policy. Hodge locates the origins of the new paradigm in the work of defense intellectuals like Thomas Barnett (The Pentagon's New Map) and the support of a cadre of military officers, led by Gen. David Petraeus, who embedded the doctrine in the military's counterinsurgency manual and oversaw its adoption during the 2007 surge. While acknowledging some tentative successes, the author argues that nation building detracts from the military's primary mission and is best left to development and diplomatic agencies. 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.
