| Sumario: | When does foreign military assistance actually protect recipient governments, and when does it catalyze coups against them? In Adam Casey's Up in Arms: How Military Aid Stabilizes—and Destabilizes—Foreign Autocrats, great powers come preloaded with military models from their own history. These have different political risk profiles when exported, and the U.S. template of apolitical professionalism is particularly dangerous. This article reviews Up in Arms ' arguments about the sources and consequences of civil-military relationships, comparative Cold War case studies on the track record of security assistance and political regime durability, and contemporary policy lessons for military aid and alliances in an era of great power competition. It contextualizes these findings with the broader security assistance literature's mixed empirical results regarding democracy, human rights, and defense capability in recipient countries, and with scholars' increasing emphasis, across research methods, on military training and education. In critiquing scope and methods both for the book and the field, the article calls for more case study work on democratic and counterinsurgent successes; closer analysis of military documents; and more systematic institutional disaggregation and ideational process tracing to assess the channels and conditions for effective security assistance.
|
|---|