Description
This paper seeks to explain a major puzzle in contemporary American foreign and counterterrorism policy: why has the United States continued to spend billions of dollars training and equipping foreign security forces despite the well documented failures of these activities? The use of military assistance is generally explained as an attempt to reduce the financial, military and political costs of overseas military intervention. Revisionist historians and historical materialist informed scholars, which this paper takes as the starting point for its analysis, have also argued that military assistance has been a key tool of imperial policing and the defence of preferred forms of political economy throughout the global south. Building on these more critical perspectives, this paper advances an alternative theoretical informed explanation for the continued reliance on military assistance. It argues that the US’s reliance on military assistance reflects a major vulnerability of the American Empire: its reproduction through a system of sovereign states rather than the imposition of direct territorial control. In connecting these bodies of literature, this paper makes a significant contribution to two debates. The first, on military assistance as a key tool of contemporary US foreign and counterterrorism policy. The second, on the continued relevance of Empire as a conceptual framework for studying the character, spatialities and vulnerabilities of American power.
