Perilous Partners
The Benefits and Pitfalls of America's Alliances with Authoritarian Regimes
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
American leaders have cooperated with regimes around the world that are, to varying degrees, repressive or corrupt. Such cooperation is said to serve the national interest. But these partnerships also contravene the nation’s commitments to democratic governance, civil liberties, and free markets.
During the Cold War, policymakers were casual about sacrificing important values for less-than-compelling strategic rationales. Since the 9/11 attacks, similar ethical compromises have taken place, although policymakers now seem more selective than their Cold War–era counterparts. Americans want a foreign policy that pursues national interests while observing American values. How might that reconciliation of interest and morality be accomplished?
In Perilous Partners, authors Ted Galen Carpenter and Malou Innocent provide a strategy for resolving the ethical dilemmas between interests and values faced by Washington. They propose maintaining an arm’s-length relationship with authoritarian regimes, emphasizing that the United States must not operate internationally in ways that routinely pollute American values. It is a strategy based on ethical pragmatism, which is the best way to reconcile America’s strategic interests and its fundamental values. Perilous Partners creates a strategy for conducting an effective U.S. foreign policy without betraying fundamental American values.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite the reference to "benefits" in the subtitle, few are described in this derisive Cato Institute treatise on post-WWII American foreign policy. Senior Cato fellow Carpenter (The Fire Next Door) and adjunct scholar Innocent tear into successive presidential administrations for pursuing relationships with authoritarian regimes throughout the world. For a country claiming to be based on "peace, democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law," as Ronald Reagan put it, the actions of the U.S. publicly and covertly did not stay true to its founding ideals. Even Jimmy Carter, famous for his focus on human rights over the realpolitik of Nixon and Kissinger, comes under fire for not doing enough to distance the U.S. from human rights abusers, notably the Shah of Iran. The president who receives the least criticism is Bill Clinton, largely because his presidency fell after the Cold War and before the War on Terror. In the authors' opinion, the reasons given for aligning with repressive regimes were rarely vital to national interests, rather serving to justify interventionalism around the world. This lengthy read may be hard to swallow for some, but it will also be eye-opening to those confused by inconsistencies and discrepancies in American foreign policy over the last 70 years.
