Stephen Tankel, “With Us and Against Us: How America’s Partners Help and Hinder the War on Terror” (Columbia UP, 2018)

With Us and Against Us: How America’s Partners Help and Hinder the War on Terror (Columbia University Press, 2018) offers readers a fresh, insightful and new perspective on US counterterrorism cooperation with complex countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Yemen and Mali. These US partners work with the United States to defeat militant groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Yet, they often are both firefighters and arsonists because they frequently simultaneously support groups that engage in political violence and/or pursue policies likely to produce a new generation of militants. US partners, moreover, at times adhere to worldviews that potentially create breeding grounds for extremism. Drawing on his extensive scholarship as well as his experience as a senior advisor to the US Department of Defense during the Obama administration, assistant professor Stephen Tankel takes the reader on a well-written, highly readable tour of the complexities and pitfalls of cooperation on counterterrorism in a post-Cold War world. Tankel unravels a minefield populated by unrealistic US expectations, an over-reliance on military tools, and lack of understanding of threat perceptions among America’s partners as well as the differing priorities that US partners have. In doing so, Tankel contributes to both the study of political violence and the far broader contexts that nourish it and the continuous debate among policymakers and pundits on how to counter it.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

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