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Dying by the Sword: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy
Dying by the Sword explores the US's evolving foreign policies from the Founding era to the present in order to ring the alarm on the US's increasing reliance on "kinetic" global diplomacy. Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi find that since the end of the Cold War and especially after 9/11, the US has initiated higher rates of military interventions, drastically escalating its usage of force abroad. Lacking clear national strategic goals, the US now pursues a whack-a-mole security policy that is more reactionary than deliberate. The book explores every major era of US foreign policy, combining historical narrative with anecdotes from US foreign policy officials, case studies, and evidence drawn from the Military Intervention Project (MIP), which measures the extent of US reliance on force.
Each chapter highlights the ways in which the US used and balanced primary tools of statecraft―war, trade, and diplomacy―to achieve its objectives. It showcases, however, that in recent decades, the US has heavily favored force over the other pillars of statecraft. The book concludes with a warning that if the US does not reduce its reliance on kinetic diplomacy, it may do irrevocable damage to its diplomatic corps and doom itself to costly wars of choice. If this trend continues, it could spell disaster for the US's image, its credibility, and―ultimately―its ability to help maintain international stability.
Each chapter highlights the ways in which the US used and balanced primary tools of statecraft―war, trade, and diplomacy―to achieve its objectives. It showcases, however, that in recent decades, the US has heavily favored force over the other pillars of statecraft. The book concludes with a warning that if the US does not reduce its reliance on kinetic diplomacy, it may do irrevocable damage to its diplomatic corps and doom itself to costly wars of choice. If this trend continues, it could spell disaster for the US's image, its credibility, and―ultimately―its ability to help maintain international stability.
300 pages, Hardcover
Published June 13, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 11, 2026
The central claim in this book - that the US strategy has shifted from diplomacy to militarism, resulting in perpetual war and increasing military interventions aimed at regime change resulting in decreased security and prosperity - is at first glance a persuasive one.
Since the authors choose to call their book a "study", it will be judged to a higher standard. Several of their indices are not defined. For example, not once is for example the hostility gap or the distinction between display of force, usage of force or war defined or operationalized. Sure, they link to various websites, but that is insufficient.
The statement is either shockingly naïve or tired propaganda. Possibly both.
First of all, I wrote my master's thesis in political science about the definition of democracy. Not once do the authors define what they mean by "democracy".
For example, I actually laughed when they take Wilson's word that "the world must be made safe for democracy" at face value. Meanwhile, Wilson's regime was increasingly authoritarian domestically, as described by John Barry in The Great Influenza:
Yes, I know that this is not foreign policy. I only use it as an example to show how the authors uncritically buy into PR soundbites.
The democracy claim also flies in the face of established facts: The US support for dictatorships all over the globe as long as it serves US interests, with some mentioned in this book. The US has never promoted democracy. It has promoted submission and servitude to the American interest. If a country that acts in accordance with US interests happens to be a democracy, that's fine. A democracy that doesn't toe the line however, is fair game.
Proxy
These international institutions promoting free trade are not neutral bodies: They are proxies promoting American interests. They certainly aren't "multilateral" as is later claimed in the book.
For example, both the President of the World Bank and the First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have always (except for as three-month period in 2019) been an American. The Managing Director of IMF have always been from a NATO country (with the exception of Sweden, a loyal NATO serf pretending to be neutral until they dropped their charade in 2024).
As Cold War historian Odd Arne Westad puts it in his book The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times:
To put it more bluntly: These institutions are also weapons used to pry open markets and punish disobedient regimes.
Lackeys
The authors also shy away from highlighting US non-direct military intervention, i.e. using the armed forces of other countries (principally dictatorships in the so-called Third World) to fight in the American interest. Indonesia or the entire continent of South America are prime examples. US military resources are used indirectly (or even directly in some cases which are curiously absent from this study).
Like the School of the Americas (now renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) run by the US Army, which has trained tens of thousands of South and Latin American soldiers in tactics like torture used to fight in the American interest by way of mass murder of civilians. Operations Gladio, described by Daniele Ganser in NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, or Condor are for example not mentioned once. How would the authors classify these examples?
Data
Moreover, their data is incomplete. One example missing from this book is Indonesia, mentioned only once in table A6.1. Direct armed interventions described by Vincent Bevins in his magnificent The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World are completely absent in this book. Like the following:
It's not only drone warfare interventions that have been left out in this book. Does it really matter to the victims if the perpetrator is employed by the US Air Force or the CIA? They both serve the same imperialist purpose.
Iraq
A disproportionately large section of this book is devoted to Kosovo, perhaps not surprising given the background of one of the authors. But it leads to this curious conclusion:
Likewise, the far too common soundbite that Afghanistan being "the longest US war" is echoed in this book without reflection.
The truth is that the US war against Iraq is by far the longest. Like many other Western commentators the authors divide it into two separate wars with a period in between. This could not be further from the truth, as explained by Jacobin.
The mass murder of Iraqis began in the 1990 Gulf War, continued through the US sanctions (the second phase of the war) pushed through the UN proxy, and exploded in the third phase of the war (not a separate war) in 2003. And it is still ongoing. The US still has an untold number, possibly scores, of military bases in Iraq.
The authors briefly mention "Resolution 661, which imposed severe economic sanctions against Baghdad" but not a word on its true effects. The sanctions denied supplies for water-treatment and distribution and sewage plants, items for repairing and rehabilitating the electric power system, equipment for the health system, medical supplies and equipment, and raw materials for the production of medical items. It restricted imports of food, medicines (including cancer medicines) and vaccines. Even items like car tyres and light bulbs.
The Nazis could not have hoped for a better result. The authors don't mention the half a million Iraqi children under the age of five who died as a result of the US sanctions, nor do they mention the infamous quote by then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright (quoted in other places in this book) that a half of million murdered Iraqi children was "worth it".
Perhaps these murdered children are an "example of the United States relying on nonviolent tools of statecraft in advancing its foreign policy" mentioned earlier.
As for the third phase, the authors (like the rest of Western media and commentators) are very careful to quote the death toll which gives the lowest estimate possible, namely those from Iraq Body Count (IBC):
First of all, the figure quoted above only refers to the number of Iraqi civilians killed according to the IBC. Not the number of Iraqis killed in total.
Secondly, the IBC doesn't even define civilian in the methods section.
Thirdly, in order to even be included in the IBC dataset, the event must be "published in at least two independent sources".
Finally, IBC relies exclusively on Western English-speaking media, or reports from Arabic media which has been translated into English.
Using the same methodology the number of Jews killed in the holocaust is in the thousands, not millions. Which is of course ludicrous. But for some reason when the US is the one holding the gun this bogus methodology is of course embraced as it allows for a minimization of Iraqi casualties.
The chapters are very piecemeal. The examples given are very shallowly described. The book would have benefited from expanding the empirical sections. But in all honesty, it would probably have worked better as an article with a more focused argument and discussion on method and sources.
Since the authors choose to call their book a "study", it will be judged to a higher standard. Several of their indices are not defined. For example, not once is for example the hostility gap or the distinction between display of force, usage of force or war defined or operationalized. Sure, they link to various websites, but that is insufficient.
During the Cold War, the United States relied on the strategy of containment to prevent World War III, deterring a great power rival while promoting democracy, free trade, and the establishment of international institutions.
The statement is either shockingly naïve or tired propaganda. Possibly both.
First of all, I wrote my master's thesis in political science about the definition of democracy. Not once do the authors define what they mean by "democracy".
For example, I actually laughed when they take Wilson's word that "the world must be made safe for democracy" at face value. Meanwhile, Wilson's regime was increasingly authoritarian domestically, as described by John Barry in The Great Influenza:
Wilson’s administration went further, yet engendered little opposition. The new Sedition Act made it punishable by twenty years in jail to “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the government of the United States.” One could go to jail for cursing the government, or criticizing it, even if what one said was true. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the Supreme Court opinion that found the act constitutional—after the war ended, upholding lengthy prison terms for the defendants—arguing that the First Amendment did not protect speech if “the words used…create a clear and present danger.”
To enforce that law, the head of what became the Federal Bureau of Investigation agreed to make a volunteer group called the American Protective League an adjunct to the Justice Department, and authorized them to carry badges identifying them as “Secret Service.” Within a few months the APL would have ninety thousand members. Within a year, two hundred thousand APL members were operating in a thousand communities.
In Chicago a “flying squad” of league members and police trailed, harassed, and beat members of the International Workers of the World. In Arizona, league members and vigilantes locked twelve hundred IWW members and their “collaborators” into boxcars and left them on a siding in the desert across the state line in New Mexico. In Rockford, Illinois, the army asked the league for help in gaining confessions from twenty-one black soldiers accused of assaulting white women. Throughout the country, the league’s American Vigilance Patrol targeted “seditious street oratory,” sometimes calling upon the police to arrest speakers for disorderly conduct, sometimes acting more…directly. And everywhere the league spied on neighbors, investigated “slackers” and “food hoarders,” demanded to know why people didn’t buy—or didn’t buy more—Liberty Bonds.
Yes, I know that this is not foreign policy. I only use it as an example to show how the authors uncritically buy into PR soundbites.
The democracy claim also flies in the face of established facts: The US support for dictatorships all over the globe as long as it serves US interests, with some mentioned in this book. The US has never promoted democracy. It has promoted submission and servitude to the American interest. If a country that acts in accordance with US interests happens to be a democracy, that's fine. A democracy that doesn't toe the line however, is fair game.
Proxy
These international institutions promoting free trade are not neutral bodies: They are proxies promoting American interests. They certainly aren't "multilateral" as is later claimed in the book.
For example, both the President of the World Bank and the First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have always (except for as three-month period in 2019) been an American. The Managing Director of IMF have always been from a NATO country (with the exception of Sweden, a loyal NATO serf pretending to be neutral until they dropped their charade in 2024).
As Cold War historian Odd Arne Westad puts it in his book The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times:
[T]he 1990s presented the concept of “globalization,” or, to use a better term, “Americanization.” Markets worldwide, and especially financial markets, were seen as being inextricably tied in to an expanding capitalist world economy with the United States – the only remaining superpower – at its center.
To put it more bluntly: These institutions are also weapons used to pry open markets and punish disobedient regimes.
Lackeys
The authors also shy away from highlighting US non-direct military intervention, i.e. using the armed forces of other countries (principally dictatorships in the so-called Third World) to fight in the American interest. Indonesia or the entire continent of South America are prime examples. US military resources are used indirectly (or even directly in some cases which are curiously absent from this study).
Like the School of the Americas (now renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) run by the US Army, which has trained tens of thousands of South and Latin American soldiers in tactics like torture used to fight in the American interest by way of mass murder of civilians. Operations Gladio, described by Daniele Ganser in NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, or Condor are for example not mentioned once. How would the authors classify these examples?
We reduce a wider universe of potential means of advancing US national interests to three main categories: (1) military intervention; (2) economic trade and aid; and (3) diplomacy and soft power (e.g., Hollywood). Diplomacy is an example of the United States relying on nonviolent tools of statecraft in advancing its foreign policy.
Data
Moreover, their data is incomplete. One example missing from this book is Indonesia, mentioned only once in table A6.1. Direct armed interventions described by Vincent Bevins in his magnificent The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World are completely absent in this book. Like the following:
Day after day, bombs fell onto Indonesian military and commercial shipping vessels. Then, on May 15, the explosions hit a market, killing both morning shoppers and Ambonese Christians attending church.
On May 18, 1958, the Indonesians managed to shoot down one of the planes, and a single figure floated slowly toward a coconut grove. His white parachute got caught in the branches of a tall palm tree, where he was stuck for a moment—then he fell to the ground and broke his hip. He was quickly found and captured by Indonesian soldiers, who probably saved him from being killed on the spot by furious locals.
His name was Allen Lawrence Pope; he was from Miami, Florida; and he was a CIA agent. Howard Jones didn’t know it, but Frank Wisner’s boys had been actively supporting the rebels since 1957.
It's not only drone warfare interventions that have been left out in this book. Does it really matter to the victims if the perpetrator is employed by the US Air Force or the CIA? They both serve the same imperialist purpose.
Iraq
A disproportionately large section of this book is devoted to Kosovo, perhaps not surprising given the background of one of the authors. But it leads to this curious conclusion:
NATO intervention in Bosnia stands as the longest US military intervention, lasting over 4,000 days.
Likewise, the far too common soundbite that Afghanistan being "the longest US war" is echoed in this book without reflection.
The truth is that the US war against Iraq is by far the longest. Like many other Western commentators the authors divide it into two separate wars with a period in between. This could not be further from the truth, as explained by Jacobin.
When Bush entered the White House, the US (with help from the UK) was bombing Iraq an average of three times a week. In 1999, the US spent $1 billion dropping bombs in Iraq; in 2000, that number was up to $1.4 billion.
Contemporary media reports referred to the bombings — at the time, the longest sustained US air operations since the Vietnam War — as a “quiet war.”
The mass murder of Iraqis began in the 1990 Gulf War, continued through the US sanctions (the second phase of the war) pushed through the UN proxy, and exploded in the third phase of the war (not a separate war) in 2003. And it is still ongoing. The US still has an untold number, possibly scores, of military bases in Iraq.
The authors briefly mention "Resolution 661, which imposed severe economic sanctions against Baghdad" but not a word on its true effects. The sanctions denied supplies for water-treatment and distribution and sewage plants, items for repairing and rehabilitating the electric power system, equipment for the health system, medical supplies and equipment, and raw materials for the production of medical items. It restricted imports of food, medicines (including cancer medicines) and vaccines. Even items like car tyres and light bulbs.
The Nazis could not have hoped for a better result. The authors don't mention the half a million Iraqi children under the age of five who died as a result of the US sanctions, nor do they mention the infamous quote by then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright (quoted in other places in this book) that a half of million murdered Iraqi children was "worth it".
Perhaps these murdered children are an "example of the United States relying on nonviolent tools of statecraft in advancing its foreign policy" mentioned earlier.
As for the third phase, the authors (like the rest of Western media and commentators) are very careful to quote the death toll which gives the lowest estimate possible, namely those from Iraq Body Count (IBC):
Even more devastating, 185,000 to 208,000 Iraqis were killed.
First of all, the figure quoted above only refers to the number of Iraqi civilians killed according to the IBC. Not the number of Iraqis killed in total.
Secondly, the IBC doesn't even define civilian in the methods section.
Thirdly, in order to even be included in the IBC dataset, the event must be "published in at least two independent sources".
Finally, IBC relies exclusively on Western English-speaking media, or reports from Arabic media which has been translated into English.
Using the same methodology the number of Jews killed in the holocaust is in the thousands, not millions. Which is of course ludicrous. But for some reason when the US is the one holding the gun this bogus methodology is of course embraced as it allows for a minimization of Iraqi casualties.
The chapters are very piecemeal. The examples given are very shallowly described. The book would have benefited from expanding the empirical sections. But in all honesty, it would probably have worked better as an article with a more focused argument and discussion on method and sources.
February 18, 2024
I had to read this book for a college class and I am glad my professor chose this book for the class. The authors do a good job of showcasing all of the United States’ uses of force throughout our history, including against Native Americans. This provides great evidence to prove the authors’ argument that the United States too willingly uses military force as a first resort and needs to reverse that. 4.5 stars
January 21, 2025
First, the arguments are totally unpersuasive. It does not matter what the US did, it was wrong. Too much militarization, not enough, anything in-between. The worst argument, to my mind, was the authors seem to truly believe that the rise of fascism in Europe was the fault of the United States, for being too isolationist. Ironically, after seeming to argue all the way up until then that the US was far too interventionist. They also think that it is an easy task to negotiate with terrorist regimes, instead of using military force. Lest you think I approve of huge military interventions, let me be clear that the US has made plenty of mistakes. Clearly, these two are acolytes of John Mearsheimer, who I find fascinating but generally wrong on how to conduct foreign policy.
January 26, 2025
I find a lot of social science and political science unpersuasive as science, and a lot of the charts and graphs seem like reaches. I'm not an academic. But I liked everything else!
I was actually not very familiar with the material covered in the sections about before and after the War of 1812, and I thought they wove that into their framework well.
I was actually not very familiar with the material covered in the sections about before and after the War of 1812, and I thought they wove that into their framework well.
May 16, 2024
A historical overview of US foreign policy and its gradual shift towards a more militaristic approach to solving problems.
While not deeply stimulating, it does give a nice overview that allows the reader to see a clear trend. Also, academically, well put together!
While not deeply stimulating, it does give a nice overview that allows the reader to see a clear trend. Also, academically, well put together!
October 21, 2024
An interesting look at the history of American military involvement and trends since the founding of the country. The book ended with useful and pragmatic ideas for the future of American international politics. The only thing is that it could have used some more robust editing for typos.
May 11, 2026
Obviously this is going to be a pretty dry book, but I thought it was a really comprehensive read on the history of foreign policy and the implications for future policy making. Im glad I finished it
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews