The Cult of the Persuasive: Why U.S. Security Assistance Fails

Abstract Security assistance is a pillar of U.S. foreign policy and a ubiquitous feature of international relations. The record, however, is mixed at best. Security assistance is hard because recipient leaders are often motivated to implement policies that keep their militaries weak. The central challenge of security assistance, then, is influence. How does the United States aim to influence recipient leaders to improve their militaries, and what drives its approach? Influence in security assistance can be understood as an escalation ladder with four rungs: teaching, persuasion, conditionality, and direct command. Washington increasingly delegates security assistance to the Department of Defense, and the latter to the U.S. Army. U.S. Army advisers tend to rely exclusively on teaching and persuasion, even when recipient leaders routinely ignore their advice. The U.S. Army's preference for persuasion and aversion to conditionality in security assistance can be traced to its bureaucratic interests and to the ideology that it has developed—the cult of the persuasive—to advance those interests. A case study examines the bureaucratic drivers of the U.S. Army's persistent reliance on persuasion to influence Iraqi leaders to reform and strengthen the Iraqi Army. Qualitative analysis leverages over one hundred original interviews, as well as oral histories and recently declassified U.S. Central Command documents. The findings illustrate how the interests and ideologies of the military services tasked with implementing U.S. foreign policy can instead undermine it.