WILLIAM THOMAS ALLISON’s research while affiliated with Georgia Southern University and other places

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Few dispute that repressive regimes take advantage of American-trained and -equipped national police forces to suppress dissent and solidify their power, or that the American practice of establishing, training, and modernizing national police forces has been rife with corruption, scandal, and outright failure. Fewer still disagree that these American programs resulted in long-term negative unintended consequences for the United States rather than bringing stability and security to American interests. As the title of this provocative book suggests, Jeremy Kuzmarov, a historian at the University of Tulsa, has little sympathy for idealist rhetoric describing American interests. According to Kuzmarov, the United States has embraced the tradition of forceful coercion in the pursuit of power practiced by empires past. Using declassified reports and other documents, along with an impressive array of secondary material, Kuzmarov tells of flawed police programs, peppered with the ripple effects of unforeseen consequences caused by imperial arrogance, paternalism, and strong-armed social control, to “sustain” American influence and interests through “violence and coercion” (p. 15). The first section of the book examines American police programs in the Philippines, Latin America, and the Caribbean from the early twentieth century through the early Cold War. Kuzmarov then reviews similar American efforts in Japan after World War II, South Korea, and, of course, Southeast Asia. The last section offers chapters on Cold War and post–Cold War police programs in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, then to modern-day Iraq and Afghanistan. Along the way, Kuzmarov details numerous police programs, including those of the Office of Public Safety, the Alliance for Progress, the International Police Academy, and the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program. The scale and scope of research is remarkable, as is the author's astute ability to reduce complex issues into a readable narrative.