'Perilous Partners: The Benefits and Pitfalls of America's Alliances with Authoritarian Regimes'

Over the past several years, the U.S. government has extended its counterterrorism efforts into Africa and partnered with several governments in the region. These partnerships typically involve the host government granting permission for the United States to carry out military and drone operations in the region. In return, the U.S. government has provided a variety of aid—money, weapons, equipment—to its host governments while also looking the other way regarding human rights abuses. Such arrangements create a fundamental tension between two tenets of U.S. foreign policy—U.S. national security on the one hand and the advancement of global human rights on the other. More often than not, members of the U.S. government choose to enter into arrangements with unsavory despots to advance the former goal while directly undermining the second. This fundamental tension is at the heart of Ted Galen Carpenter and Malou Innocent’s important book Perilous Partners.