Alliance Curse: How America Lost the Third World

Notes

Chapter One 1. Gilman (2003). 2. Fighting the cold war required inculcating norms for continued social and personal sacrifices, coming on the heels of an entire decade of hardship and separation caused by war. We constructed a cultural space insulated from random currents that might trigger new cultural and ideological recombination and selection. The imperative of consistency was needed to protect America’s once open intellectual heritage from challenges to the central claims of containment. Evidence to the contrary was abandoned as not critical to the central hypothesis about the dangers of international Communism. Once institutionalized, hypotheses central to the conceptual web of containment became irrefutable. We made cultural investments in the model, named heroes and villains, and memorialized sacrifices made by our ancestors as we learned to attribute our security to their efforts. Then just as we were ready to declare victory, jihads against America surfaced in countries considered to be bastions of pro–United States sentiment, stable pillars of our alliance system. 3. Unfortunately, the rebels who challenge long-standing autocratic rulers may not necessarily seek to expand the size of the winning coalition, but to seize control of the state. 4. Generally in long-standing autocratic regimes the leadership—and not the people —captures most of the gains the alliance provides. 5. Bueno de Mesquita and Root (2000, pp. 404–08). 6. The connection between political survival and good governance is discussed in Bueno de Mesquita and Root (2000) and Bueno de Mesquita and others (2003). 7. That foreign aid serves as bribes from rich to poor countries was stressed by Morgenthau (1962, pp. 301–09). Bueno de Mesquita and Smith (2007) provide an analytical model that links the appeal of such deals to the size of a regime’s winning coalition. They concluded that “the US was most likely to give aid to its friends Notes 221 during the Cold War. Alternatively, as our theory suggests, the US buys alignment through aid.” 8. Economic rent refers to the difference between what a factor of production is paid and how much it would need to be paid to remain in its current use. In perfect competition economic rents do not exist—they would be eliminated by competition when new firms enter a market. Rent seeking refers to activities that consume resources to achieve a pure transfer of wealth from one sector, group, or individual to another. These activities are wasteful because they use up resources without creating additional value for society at large. Lobbying for a monopoly is a good example of one such wasteful activity. 9. An example is the takeover of many privately owned firms and the expansion of state ownership during the U.S.-backed Marcos regime. When democracy was reestablished in the Philippines, the weakness of mechanisms to prevent the misuse of government allowed the new leaders to continue the looting of the public treasury that Marcos had begun. 10. Internal conflict measures the level of political violence in the country and its actual or potential impact on governance. Countries without armed opposition to the government and in which the government does not indulge in arbitrary violence, direct or indirect, against its own people receive the highest rating. The lowest rating reflects an ongoing civil war. 11. Bueno de Mesquita and Root (2000). 12. The resource curse is sometimes referred to as the Dutch disease (Sachs and Warner 1995, 2001; Sala-i-Martin and Subramanian 2003;“The Dutch Disease,”Economist , November 26, 1977, pp. 82–83). The original formulation of the resource curse focused on the economic consequences of resource exports, causing the country’s currency to rise in value against other currencies and crowding out nonresource export activities. Ross (2001) found that between 1971and 1997 reliance on mineral wealth eroded democratic tendencies in a sample of 113 states. The discovery that resource rents are likely to induce autocracy has expanded the scope of discussion about the resource curse to include questions of governance. See also Ross (1999) and Auty (1993) on how mineral wealth stunts political development. 13. Cohen and Chollet (2007). 14. The return on investment is impaired by projects that yield an inflated rate of return to the beneficiaries, who are generally regime loyalists. White elephants and cost overruns are among the commonplace reasons that the resource surplus does not translate into sustained income increases. 15. “Other things being equal, the stronger the donor’s interest in creating an asymmetrical dependency relationship, the harder it is to do, since it...