Offshoring Militarism: U.S. Military Aid and the Limits of American Foreign Policy

Abstract

This dissertation examines the determinants, effects, and implications of contemporary United States foreign policy tools, with a focus on U.S. foreign aid programs which provide military equipment, weapons, and security sector training to foreign countries – generally known as military aid or security assistance. I focus on how and why U.S. policymakers have used these foreign policy tools to pursue various strategic interests and goals around the world – primarily from the end of the Cold War through the late War on Terror – and question the effectiveness of this these programs for achieving such goals. In the first chapter, I study how the U.S. uses military aid as a way to promote U.S. arms exports in the competitive global arms market. I argue that the U.S. utilizes military aid as a way to maintain its market share dominance in arms importing countries, in order to prevent recipients from turning to competitor arms suppliers, such as China and Russia. I find that increased relative funding of military aid and security assistance correlates with recipient countries where the U.S. maintains a greater share of the arms import market. In the second chapter, I study the contemporary policy of using security assistance to prevent internal instability abroad, and examine the relationship between U.S. security assistance programs and changes in recipient states’ internal instability. I describe several mechanisms by which security assistance may fail to improve stability in states with fragile domestic institutions, and how such assistance can potentially stoke conflict or empower abusive regimes and security sectors. I find that increased relative amounts of U.S. security assistance funding does not correlate with improving indicators of state fragility, but instead correlates with slightly worsening state fragility scores. In the final chapter, I examine the fundamental flaws in how U.S. security assistance policies are developed and implemented to achieve the U.S.’s various strategic goals. I argue that security assistance programs often reflect the short-term and shifting political strategies and concerns of U.S. policymakers, rather than the conditions or root causes of problems within the recipient countries. I also argue that these programs are strategically and substantively inadequate for achieving long-term policy goals in recipient countries or for solving complex, institutional problems abroad. I use two critical case studies of security assistance recipients – Pakistan and Colombia – and find that in both cases, security assistance policies lacked a long-term strategy, were inadequate for addressing the goals set forth by U.S. policymakers, and generated counterproductive effects. These chapters contribute to research and policy debates on the limits, effectiveness, and implications of contemporary U.S. foreign policy.