Armed Humanitarians: The Rise of the Nation Builders

In May 2003, President George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq. But while we won the war, we catastrophically lost the peace. Our failure prompted a fundamental change in our foreign policy: confronted with the shortcomings of "shock and awe," the U.S. military shifted its focus to "stability operations," counterinsurgency and the rebuilding of failed states. In less than a decade, foreign assistance has become militarized; humanitarianism has been armed. Our armed forces became a Peace Corps with precision munitions. Combining recent history and firsthand reporting, Armed Humanitarians traces how the concepts of nation-building came into vogue, and how, evangelized through think tanks, government seminars, and the press, this new doctrine took root inside the Pentagon and the State Department. It also tells the story of this extraordinary experiment in armed social work, the defining experience for a generation of U.S. foreign policy practitioners. Nathan Hodge reveals the difficulties of translating these ambitious new theories into action - straining our resources and driving further reliance on outsourcing and private contractors - and explains how this strategy has led to perceptions of a new imperialism, endangering our already diminished standing in the world. This important book will shed light on the new era of foreign policy as a noble but flawed experiment: as we attempt to build nations, we may ultimately be weakening our own.

Nathan Hodge is a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Based in Washington, D.C., he has reported extensively from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union. He is the author, with Sharon Weinberger, of A Nuclear Family Vacation, and his work has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and many other publications.