Altruism and Realpolitik: A History of the U.S. Agency for International Development

Does international development work and how? Is it worth it and why? These are the perennial development questions John Norris addresses in his book, The Enduring Struggle: The History of the U.S. Agency for International Development and America’s Uneasy Transformation of the World, a thorough account of the agency from its birth in 1961 to the end of 2020. Readers who wrestle with these questions in their daily work will appreciate Norris’ powerful examples drawn from meticulous primary and secondary research. Its twelve chapters are chronologically organized by presidential administration and further subdivided by geography, sector, key event, or a thorny issue. Norris draws from interviews (some are personal communications with the author and others from USG archives), substantive news articles (especially the New York Times, Time, and the Washington Post), government documents, and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) publications to tell his story. Norris seeks to locate politicians on a scale between two strategic views of foreign aid—one altruistic and the other realpolitik—did each president and his administration fall and why, and