Charles W. King

A month ago the Trump administration announced that it was cutting off financial assistance to Pakistan to the tune of $255 million. Relations between the United States and Pakistan have been strained for years due to an apparent unwillingness or inability on the part of the Pakistani government to address the presence of Afghan Taliban fighters using the semi-autonomous Federally Administrated Tribal Area (FATA) as a base of operations. The Trump administration has gone further, alleging that the Pakistani government attempted to deceive American officials in order to receive aid they never meant to use against the Taliban in Pakistan. This assessment is not without merit; in 2007 the Pakistani military negotiated a deal with Taliban forces in the FATA after two years of disastrous military operations against the combined forces of the Afghan Taliban and Tribal militias. This deal caused strain between the George W. Bush and Obama administrations and the Pakistani governments, and numerous member of Congress have been calling for a reassessment of American aid to Pakistan for years.

The ongoing situation in Pakistan raises the question as to whether or not there is value in giving foreign aid to a country that appears to be acting counter to American interests. This means asking what is going to happen to Pakistan without the American aid it has been receiving since the Cold War, and is that going to be more or less dangerous to the United States and its interests than the status quo? Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is considered to be one of the best intelligence services in the world, punching well above its weight relative the security services of countries of similar size and development. This is due to the history and geopolitical situation that Pakistan has found itself in since independence in 1947. Tension with the also newly independent India began immediately, and in 1971 India defeated Pakistan in a war that resulted in the independence of Bangladesh. Relations with Pakistan’s other neighbors, Afghanistan and Iran, have also always been tense, prompting an outsized influence of the Pakistani military in domestic politics including coups in 1977 and 1999. Throughout the territory of Kashmir has been disputed between Pakistan and India, and concerned that the Pakistani military is unable to defeat the Indian military in a conventional conflict Pakistan developed nuclear weapons and cooperates with the Haqqani network of militants and groups who have conducted terrorist attacks in India. Surrounded by India, Afghanistan, China, and Iran and with instable domestic politics it is understandable why the Pakistani government and military consistently act to limit the risk of increased instability or existential danger.

This suggests that American aid to Pakistan was never entirely about Pakistani cooperation in the War or Terror. Given the dangers, real and perceived, to the Pakistani state from within and without and Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, it is understandable that the United States would seek to prevent the failure of the Pakistani state. It is truly an example of choosing the devil you know over the devil you don’t. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s the world managed to survive the very real danger of loose nuclear weapons, it might not be so lucky if Pakistan collapsed. As distasteful as it may be to support a government with the human rights record and bellicose nature that Pakistan exhibits, preventing loose nuclear weapons from falling into the wrong hands might be a bargain at twice the price.

Charles W. King

The discipline of anthropology has a problematic past. It was created by the imperial powers of the eighteenth century to apply scientific rigor to examinations of their imperial subjects in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The premise of these studies of subject peoples was to catalog how they were different from their European masters.  This is a process which social scientists now term ‘othering’. Describing persons as ‘others’ permits that would violate societal norms if taken against people you identify with. The ways in which imperial anthropologists described their subjects further established justification for European imperial domination. Cultures in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia were frequently described as emotional and matriarchal, in contrast to rational and patriarchal Europeans. For societies like those of imperial Europe that associated femininity with irrationality, and that prized the scientific and the rational as inherently morally superior describing a culture as matriarchal or emotional is a way of describing them as inferior.

Being inferior and being sub-human was a distinction made by imperial anthropologists or the government that funded them, it provided justification for the way those government wanted to treat their subjects. The historiography of slavery in the United States is an excellent example of this. To this day most American high school students are taught that slaves in the American South had a matriarchal culture. The historical record does not support this. Enslaved women were more equal to their male peers and had more access to positions of authority within enslaved communities, but only relative to free women at the time. Nowhere in the United States were enslaved women at the top of the hierarchy of enslaved people. What is a matter of historical record is that enslaved people in the United States were not considered to be human. This is a matter of record in speeches, laws, and court decisions and one of the frequent rationales for their supposed inferiority was a lack of a capacity for reason.

The historic purpose of anthropology as justification for enslavement and exploitation is something that the discipline continues to grapple with today. For policy-makers it is important to take lessons from anthropology’s attempts to reform their discipline. The western world continues to prize rationality, and it is easy to describe those it competes with as irrational, whether they are religious zealots, nationalist fanatics, or both. Previous articles have discussed the rationality and strategic value of suicide terrorism and nuclear weapons, and warned how treating these threats as the results of irrationality is unproductive and dangerous. A certain amount of ‘us versus them’ is inescapable in geopolitics, borders are drawn on maps and people self-identify as specific nationalities and cultures. Policy-makers must be careful not to exacerbate these perceptions. Doing so makes it easier to justify exploitation and the use of force, and harder to come to diplomatic agreements. Policy-makers must be wary of repeating the mistakes of their imperialist forebears who treated the rest of the world as resources to be enslaved and exploited and suffered a crippling backlash in the twentieth century.

Further Reading

Jane Burbank, and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History. (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 2010).

Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York City, NY: Pantheon Books, 1978).

David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)

Charles W. King

Only after being attacked by the Imperial Japanese Navy at Pearl Harbor and very reluctantly the United States took its place on the world stage. Having retreated back to isolation on its own side of the Atlantic after the World War One; American involvement in World War Two and after marked a watershed moment in the popular conception of American history. For most America the superpower is fundamentally different in its approach to the world than America the isolationist. On the contrary, America the isolationist is a fiction, and American foreign policy has been consistent across its entire history. American foreign policy as a superpower in the twentieth century continued the priorities and methods of the United States not only during the nineteenth century, but also the eighteenth, including prior to the American Revolution.

In the decades before the turn of the twentieth century an increasing number of Americans advocated that the United States should pursue a policy of imperialism, acquiring overseas possessions like the British, French, and Germans. Theodore Roosevelt was one of imperialism’s advocates, but Alfred Thayer Mahan was its most important. Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History convinced Roosevelt and others that the United States needed a strong navy to ensure its continued prosperity, and a global network of coaling stations was an essential part of that plan. In 1898 the United States declared war on Spain, under the pretext of the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor. The war was swift and decisive, and as a result the US took the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico and Cuba became an American protectorate. For some the acquisition of overseas colonies after the Spanish-American War marks the change in American foreign policy, heralding how the US will engage with the world after World War Two.

The acquisition of overseas colonies was not a change in method for the United States but a change in target. The United States had been steadily expanding its territory for more than a hundred years. British prohibitions against the Thirteen Colonies expanding past the Appalachian Mountains were a major cause of the American Revolution. The Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican-American War, the California Gold Rush all continued the US’s westward expansion. In the eighteenth centuries while the British, French, and Germans sent their colonial settlers by boat to Africa, India, Asia, and Australia the US sent theirs West in covered wagons. Manifest Destiny was imperialism by another name. Westward expansion was an important engine of American prosperity, after reaching the Pacific continued prosperity demanded that American policy-makers look abroad.

From the establishment of Jamestown until the Spanish-American War the US’s mode of expansion was settler colonialism, the hallmark of European imperialism. Comparing American westward expansion with European colonization of Africa, India, Asia, and Australia runs counter to the idea of American exeptionalism. It is essential to recognize the long standing continuities of American foreign policy, of which expansion is only one. The United States continues its expansion today, no longer through settler colonialism, or imperial administration but through market access. This sobering assessment of American foreign policy and understanding of how the US continues to expand its influence today will help policy-makers to better understand why foreign nations are wary of American influence and produce better strategies to achieve foreign policy objectives.

Further Reading

Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, (New York, NY: Little, Brown, & Co.: 1890).

Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion 1890-1945, (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1982).

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

Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

Charles W. King

Today much of the Western public and many Western policy-makers and diplomats have a dangerous conception of world history. In this popular version history Western liberal democracy is the inevitable result of hundreds of years of unbroken prosperity and progress towards ever greater suffrage and markets, and the collapse of Eastern empires in Russia, China and the Middle East in the twentieth century was a death rattle of a disease that lasted just as long. This is a profound misunderstanding of history and leads to an erroneous perception of Eastern nations being not only behind, but centuries behind the West. Acting on this incorrect conception of history demonstrates massive hubris, and makes it difficult to understand foreign perspectives and formulate good strategies and foreign policy.

The free market is one of the hallmarks of Western liberalism. Some historians and pundits have drawn a direct line from modern free trade back five hundred years to rudimentary markets in European towns and villages. This connection demonstrates a failure to understand how different medieval market trade and modern capitalism are. The former was not unique to Europe and the latter is a much more recent and dramatic change than this version of events would indicate. Stock exchanges may have existed for more than a hundred years when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, but Britain would remain a mercantilist empire for another hundred years.

The point at which Europe set foot on the path would lead to its dominance in the twentieth century is possibly the most controversial ongoing debate in academic history. The problematic connection of medieval markets to industrial capitalism represents a small set of historians and others who have gone looking to find that divergence as far back as possible. There is much more convincing evidence to suggest that the divergence between Europe, Asia and the Middle East happened much later than many people believe.

Another major milestone of Western liberalism is the commoditization of land. In feudal systems land was ruled by lords, held in common, and rights to use a given plot of land were not inheritable. Enclosure and the Doctrine of Improvement in English Common Law changed this. As a commodity land could be traded, as something owned privately investment in increased productivity was worthwhile. The commoditization of land in Western Europe was an essential innovation that provided the agricultural output needed to fuel empire, or so the story goes. Except commoditization of land was not unique to England at the time, or even unique to Europe. Ottoman tax records from Palestine, Iraq, and Anatolia show that land was being traded as a commodity there too, independent of similar innovation in Europe. The failure of the Ottoman Empire’s Tanzimat reforms in the nineteenth century are frequently used as evidence of the empire’s status as ‘The Sick Man of Europe’ but this ignores the fact that the Empire was implementing these reforms not decades after its European counterparts but in the same time frame and its efforts, while not as successful as either the UK or Germany, were more successful than Spanish or Austro-Hungarian reforms. Treating the Ottoman Empire and the states that descend from it as backwards is a serious error.

That Western empires and their resulting liberal democracies have had a dominant position on the world state recently is not arguable. But this has not always been the case, and it is important that historians and policy makers avoid conceptions of history that emphasize how, and for how long Europe has been dominant. It leads to erroneous conclusions and poses significant problems for policy-making and the conducting of diplomacy. It makes it difficult to apprehend and understand the perspective of nations in Asia and the Middle East, and it prevents good policy-making by treating liberal democracy deterministically.

Further Reading

Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasats in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Pres: 1995).

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Charles W. King

If the failures of nation building projects in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan must serve as a warning to policy-makers what should they look to for an example of success? The Balkan nations that NATO intervened in the 1990s are a possibility; they are in the process of accession to the European Union and negotiating their own regional free trade agreement as the EU focuses on Brexit and refugee policy. But these nations are not yet finished building the institutions that will carry them forward, as demonstrated by the ongoing corruption probes in a number of Balkan states. The Republic of Korea and the Republic of Taiwan provide better examples of successful nation building projects. When they were founded in the late 1940’s they did not have the institutional foundations that facilitated the reconstruction of West Germany and Japan. Decades later South Korea and Taiwan have joined Germany and Japan on the world stage as major allies of the United States, and significant players in the global economy. They have transitioned from ‘developmental autocracy’, to borrow a phrase from Gregg Brazinsky of George Washington University, to democratic governments.

Two of the key factors in these successes were the development of state institutions and export economies. At their founding neither South Korea nor Taiwan possessed an industrial economy or plentiful natural resources that could fill national coffers and provide an easy road to prosperity. Forced to develop economies from scratch they elected to develop for export rather than to protect against foreign imports. Successful industrial export economies require an educated workforce for the research and development, and the high quality manufacturing that sustains them. It also requires independent courts and rule of law to limit corruption and provide stability and predictability to foreign investors and partners. This strong economic development at a precursor to democratization is a common historical development, not unique to South Korea and Taiwan.

South Korea and Taiwan have also each faced a single existential threat since their founding; North Korea and the People’s Republic of China respectively. This has substantially distorted the shape of their national institutions. Where the leaders of other ‘developmental autocracies’ have used Western liberalism as a post-colonial boogeyman, and made internal dissent the primary focus of their security forces, South Korea and Taiwan could afford to do neither. Confronted with these existential threats, their militaries developed as important and respected institutions of the state rather than as oppressors of the people.

Decades of economic and institution building under ‘developmental autocracy’ provided the foundations that South Korea and Taiwan needed to become prosperous democracies. They also represent two the longest and most expensive and expansive nation building commitments the United States engaged in during the Cold War. They are not the only ‘development autocracies’ the United States supported, but they are the most successful. Policy-makers should take a number of lessons from their examples; the nature of the economic development is important, and integrating the military and other state institutions as a part of the society is essential. Subsiding dictators in exchange for policy or resources will not lead to economic development or democratization but is sometimes necessary. By having a clear conception of their strategic objectives and an understanding of the differences between the successes in South Korea, Taiwan, West Germany, and Japan and failures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan policy-makers can better determine what policies to implement and how much support they can commit to.

Further Reading

Gregg Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Strait Talk: United States-Taiwan Relations and the Crisis with China, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

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

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

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