Charles W. King

The enormous cost and dubious return on funds provided for reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have prompted another round of resistance to further ‘Nation Building’ by the United States. Previous resistance to nation building peaked after the NATO peacekeeping missions in the Balkans in the 1990’s and after the Vietnam War in the 1970’s. Many Americans are not aware of the massive efforts made to support the Republic of Vietnamese. The United States spent $1.5 billion on state building projects between 1954 and 1960. American contractors built not only military bases in South Vietnam, but massive infrastructure projects including harbors, airports, and highway networks. After the war the US government was reluctant to engage not only in the manner of warfare experienced in Vietnam, but also investments of the scale it had made in the South Vietnamese state.

The failures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan contrast starkly with the unbridled successes of American rebuilding efforts in Western Europe and Japan after World War Two. In both Europe and Asia the US was able to turn devastated countries into strong allies and vibrant markets in just a few years. The fact that reconstruction efforts in West Germany and Japan were during peace time rather than in the midst of a conflict is an important factor, but it is not the only factor. In Germany and Japan the US was rebuilding the infrastructure of existing states. In Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan the US was building, not rebuilding, infrastructure for a new state. Germany and Japan already possessed strong state institutions. Where they had been turned towards war, now these institutions were being turned to collective defense and the free market. The existence of these institutions meant what  Germany and Japan needed was institutional reform and to rebuild their broken infrastructure. This taught American policy-makers in the decades since an incorrect lesson, that rebuilding broken roads and power grids was enough to create a strong state.

It is institutions not infrastructure that facilitated Germany and Japan’s transition from fascist aggressors to keystones of the post-war liberal order. The inability of infrastructure investment to create strong institutions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan should not be a surprise to policy-makers. It is essential to recognize what construction projects in states without strong institutions can and cannot accomplish. The question for policy-makers in cases such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States has a vested interest in establishing stable states, is how to create institutions that will endure and be effective.

Further Reading

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, (New York, NY: Vintage, 1996).

Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1998).

James A. Baker III, and Lee H. Hamilton, The Iraq Study Group Report, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2006).

James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954-1968. (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press: 2008).

Charles W. King

History is useful in policy-making for two reasons. First, it allows policy makers to better empathize with others and understand what and how they think, facilitating better assessments and strategies. Second, history can be predictive. Understanding how and why events happened in the past can allow historians and policy-makers to predict how events might play out in the future, to a limited extent. However this predictive value is dangerous, at its simplest it can lead to erroneous conclusions; that because events are similar they will produce the same results. At its worst it results in what the historical profession calls ‘Determinism’.

The two most famous examples of Determinism are Karl Marx’s works:  The Manifesto of the Communist Party and Das Kapital, and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. While these works argue for differing end states for history, they both purport there to be an specific end point for human history. The dictatorship of the proletariat in Marx’s case, Western liberal democracy in Fukuyama’s.  In Marx’s case such a dictatorship of the proletariat did not exist when he died in 1883, making his work almost purely predictive. Not only was it predictive, but Marx argued that his historical materialist approach showed that there was only one single possible outcome of human history: communism. That Western liberal democracies existed when Fukuyama published The End of History does not change the fact that he makes a similar argument: that the only possible outcome of human history is Western liberal democracy. Both authors have taken a step beyond using history as a method for understanding the human condition and current events or predict possible outcomes, and are claiming that there is only a single possible result of the human experience. This is determinism, and it is dangerous.

The craft of history relies on the concept that by investigating past events through primary and secondary sources, oral histories and other artifacts historians can better understand the past and present. It is much harder to do such investigations with a mind open to all the possibilities when the author believes in a specific outcome. In science this is the reason why double-blind studies are the norm for good scholarship. Both Marx and Fukuyama’s works have been examined by other scholars since their publication, and have been rightfully criticized for failures of scholarship.

When using history for policy-making determinism must be at the forefront of policy-maker’s minds. Belief in an inevitable result will result in an assessment of past and present events that is unduly colored. It is important to have a policy objective in mind when establishing policy and strategy. Ignoring historical events and how history affects the perspectives and motivations of others will result in policy that fails to accomplish its objective and weakens American standing. History has tremendous predictive utility—particularly some disciplines of history such as environmental and cliometric history. A historical work does not have to attempt to be predictive to be deterministic, but only to demonstrate a belief that history has a single possible result. Determinism leads to tunnel vision at best, willful ignorance at worst, and it results in bad history and worse policy.

Further Reading

Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, (London, UK: Workers' Educational Association, 1848).

Karl Marx , Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I. The Process of Capitalist Production, (Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr and Co., 1906).

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, (New York, NY: Free Press, 1992).

Charles W. King

Many American policy-makers, in the in Congress and the White House, are increasingly critical of spending on foreign aid. The criticism of cuts to foreign aid as a method of balancing the national budget is legitimate, but beyond the scope of this article. Instead it will discuss what kinds of aid the United States provides, why it does so, and what the benefits and drawbacks of such aid are. The United States, through the State Department and USAID, provide not only monetary aid, but also food, medical aid, and defense aid. While ‘Soft Power’ has been a focus of the State Department in recent decades, the United States has engaged in foreign aid for much longer than that. It did so, and continues to provide foreign aid for a multitude of reasons.

Food and medical aid are perhaps the most visible form of foreign aid that the United States provides; white sacks of grain with red and blue “USA” on them have become a staple of reporting on USAID programs. The reputation as a good samaritan that the United States gains from disaster relief is not irrelevant, but the impact that such aid has in the US and abroad has more concrete effects. In states receiving aid there can be significant distortions in the economy, and local politics. The presence of free or cheap food can cause a drop in food prices, leading local farmers to cease farming, exacerbating food shortages. There are also repeated accounts of warlords and others seizing food and medical aid and using it to strengthen their political standing. The flip side of the coin is that food aid is intended to distort the United States economy. The vast majority of foodstuffs provided are purchased as part of the US’s agricultural subsidy program to boost the market price of the products of American farms. US food aid also introduces American staple grains like corn and wheat to markets where they were not previous popular, creating new markets for American goods. Starvation and epidemics also increase instability, providing aid ensures stability to regions of vital national interest to the US.

Monetary aid is also a mixed blessing. President Carter began providing aid to Egypt in exchange for Egyptian recognition of Israel. This achieved a minor policy objective. The Egyptian government fulfilled its commitment with lip service, and the money sustained the repressive Egyptian state without the need to develop the Egyptian economy. This resulted in a loss of American prestige in Egypt at a steep monetary cost for little gain. Not all monetary aid is money down the drain. The Marshall Plan provided a tremendous amount of monetary aid to Europe after World War Two, which was then used to purchase American goods. This sustained the American economy as it transitioned from war materiel to consumer goods, and increased the access of American businesses to foreign markets.

Similarly defense aid to foreign allies, in the form of arms as well as cash or financing for arms purchases, serve as a subsidy for the American economy. Israel continues to be the largest recipient of American foreign aid, and much of that money returns to the US as payment to American defense contractors and manufacturers. While it is true that this money could be spent on other domestic projects or purchases for the US military, it is in US interests to ensure that both the manufacturing and research and development fields of the American defense industry are healthy. Foreign aid for defense spending does this effectively.

The United States does not provide foreign aid out of the goodness of its heart, nor simply to stake a claim on the moral high ground in international affairs.  Foreign aid does have some negative side effects, but the benefits to the US are concrete and substantial. Foreign aid subsidizes American agriculture, industry & science, ensures market access, preserves regional stability, and facilitates foreign cooperation with policy objectives. Cutting the foreign aid budget would not simply be a sacrifice of nebulous American ‘Soft Power’; it would be a serious blow to the United States’ economy and national security.

Further Reading

William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009).

Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Moderinzation, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1994).

Charles W. King

The last two centuries have seen tens of millions of people die of famine across the world. Few things make government seem more impotent than their people slowly dying of hunger as they sit by unable to anything about the lack of ample food. These deaths, probably more than a hundred million, are tragic, and doubly so because of an insidious lie; there has always been enough food. Despite the consternations of Thomas Malthus, increases in the productivity of agriculture have consistently outpaced the growth of the population. This raises the question as to why the nineteenth and twentieth centuries experienced horrific death rates from famine, unprecedented in the history of mankind.

The most straightforward answer is that these deaths are the responsibility of natural disasters, droughts and other natural phenomenon that destroyed crops and lives. This fails to recognize that drought, locusts, blights, and the like are not a new occurrence.  Since the advent of agriculture droughts and other natural disasters have occurred, and societies have found ways to mitigate their effects. The droughts that preceded some of the deadliest famines were equally devastating to crops. Research has shown that the famines in British ruled India in 1876-1879 and 1896-1902 were of a severity that had happened dozens of times in the previous centuries. Why then did millions Indians die of starvation between 1876 and 1879, many orders of magnitude more than died as a result of droughts of similar size only decades before? It is also important to understand that two of the most well-known crop disasters of the last two hundred years are man-made in their origin. Both the Irish Potato Famine and the American Dustbowl were caused by the unsustainable agricultural methods of the Irish and American farmers.

It is the Irish Potato Famine that best illuminates the true cause of famine deaths in recent centuries. Legend has it that upon hearing of the plight of the Irish the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire declared that he would be sending food aid to the Irish and money in the amount of ten thousand pounds sterling. This caused a minor diplomatic incident as the Queen of England had only donated two thousand pounds. More important than the wrangling over charitable donations was the fact that for the duration of the famine Ireland remained a net exporter of foodstuffs, primarily wheat. This is not unique to the Irish Potato Famine. India remained an exporter of food during both the famine of 1876-1879 (6.1 to 10.3 million deaths), and the famine of 1896-1902 (6.1 to 19 million deaths). China and Brazil experienced famines the same years (a consequence of global climate phenomenon) with death tolls proportional to their populations. Both continued to export food. This is not unique to the nineteenth century. Ethiopia experienced a devastating famine between 1989 and 1990, prompting an outpouring of support from the developed world. Throughout the famine Ethiopia was a net exporter of food.

It is not that the world has not possessed enough food to feed those who have died of starvation in the past two centuries, research shows that it is unlikely that food would have had to been imported to relieve most famine stricken areas.  Whether Indian, African, South American, Chinese or otherwise, those who have died of starvation have been unable to afford the food that was in their own countries. The purchasing power of the growing metropolises of the developed world has been too much for them to overcome. This is not unique to the colonial and developing world. In the late eighteenth century there were riots across England—in cities and rural towns—as the price of wheat on the newly open markets grew to be unaffordable for peasant farmers and urban laborers alike. Like the colonial and developing world, the English peasantry had utilized systems of famine and risk mitigation for hundreds of years, it was only with the introduction of new market systems that the English began to stave and riot.

Societies in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East have been successfully dealing with natural disasters for thousands of years, and yet in the last three centuries there has been a devastating increase in famine deaths. Mankind has had a measurable impact upon the global climate, but even that is not yet extensive enough to be responsible for the millions of deaths from starvation. It is also not fair to place the blame for these deaths entirely on the merchants who exported food from famine stricken areas. That they were responding to market incentives does not absolve them of responsibility, but also highlights that a policy that may be good for some is not necessarily good for all. This also cannot be a blanket incitement of global free trade, which has saved millions and raised the quality of life of billions. It is essential that policy-makers understand that in the twenty-first century famine is not a natural disaster or even the result of agricultural practices. Famine is a political failure, and it has dire consequences for security and stability.

Further Reading

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, (New York, NY: Verso: 2002).

E. P. Thomson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century." Past & Present No. 50 (February, 1971).

Charles W. King

In recent years the United States has begun to deploy new methods of countering ballistic missile systems, particularly to Poland and more recently South Korea. Both deployments have explicitly been to counter the increasing capability of Iranian and North Korean missile systems.  The Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China have objected vehemently to the deployment of anti-ballistic missile systems near their borders. Some of the saber-rattling and acts of aggression that Russia and China have undertaken recently may be a direct response to the deployment of these systems.

Why the Russians and Chinese would react so aggressively to an apparently defensive system shows how subtle the intricacies of nuclear weapons strategy are. The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was one of the landmark treaties of the Cold War. It prevented the Cold War from escalating further. If the US or the USSR were confident that it would be able to destroy any and all incoming nuclear weapons then they would be more willing to engage in a policy of first strike.  Both sides were understandably afraid the other would adopt such a policy. While the ABM Treaty did not eliminate ABM systems from American or Soviet arsenals, it limited their numbers of to hundreds interceptors at a time when each side possessed thousands of warheads and delivery systems. Without the ability to mount a completely effective ABM defense neither side would be willing to engage in a first strike policy. The US’s withdrawal in 2002 from the ABM Treaty did not lead to the breakdown of the international non-proliferation regime that some feared at the time, but does represent a dramatic shift in American nuclear weapon strategy.

Some observers are reasonably skeptical of whether the deployment of systems like Terminal High Altitude Ariel Defense (THAAD) significantly increase the US’s ability to intercept Russian and Chinese missiles. After all, the US already operates ABM sites in Japan and Naval ABM systems. The neglects the fact that any reduction in the viability of a nuclear deterrent is a serious threat to a nuclear deterrent.

It is this possibility, that their nuclear arsenals no longer have a deterrent value in the face of American ABM systems like THAAD, that has made the Russians and Chinese object to the deployment of American ABM systems so violently. The Russians and Chinese rely on their nuclear deterrent just as much as the US does, if not more. They have a more recent and extensive history of foreign domination than the United States does, as well as disputed land borders and off-shore claims, neither of which are an issue for the US. Russia and China have been the primary targets for American nuclear weapons since the end of World War Two, that the US might be able to use them without fear of retaliation is understandably terrifying to Russian and Chinese policy-makers. It will continue to be essential for American policy-makers to balance the need to counter the threat of nuclear weapons from pariah states like Iran and North Korea with the escalation of tensions with longtime rivals like Russia and China.

Further Reading

Ronald E. Powaski, March to Armageddon: The United States and the Nuclear Arms Race, 1939 to the Present, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987).

David E. Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2009).