Shafer informs us that not only were our supposed successes in counterinsurgency actually failures, he argues that America's counterinsurgency policy has been and remains inherently flawed since its inception. He addresses five explanations given by various parties to explain America's counterinsurgency policies: 1) realism, 2) presidential politics, 3) bureaucratic politics, 4) American exceptionalism, and 5) cognitive content. After describing what these various positions consist of, he presents a case study of four different counterinsurgency campaigns in an effort to show which position best explains the form of counterinsurgency policy the government took in each case. First, he looks at France's counterinsurgency record in Indochina for the purpose of comparing France's policy then to America's policy later. He concludes that the French effort closely parallels the American effort, which disproves the theory that American exceptionalism can explain our counterinsurgency efforts and failures. Next he looks at post-World War II Greece. Basically, the Truman Doctrine of 1948 marks the birth of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts, so the Greek case study is of great importance. His next case study is the Philippines of the early 1950s, and his final study, naturally enough, is Vietnam. The Greek and Philippine counterinsurgency efforts were hailed as successes, but Shafer argues that forces outside America's efforts determined those successful conclusions. American aid and policy was ill-conceived and often did more harm than good; the governments in question did not act as we wanted them to and would not have succeeded even if they had. He makes a fairly convincing argument; certainly, frustration was high among policymakers throughout these times because the governments we were supporting used our aid to prop themselves up and even to purge their own political enemies. Victory in Greece and the Philippines came despite America's counterinsurgency plans, he argues. Everything broke down in Vietnam, of course, and failure there is obvious.

Shafer basically argues that American policymakers have always relied on very pervasive, unquestioned beliefs, and that is the true problem. Policymakers never understood the local dynamics of the states in question, tending to view their governments as legitimate, ignore the real source of discontent among the poor population, and focus with tunnel vision on an external Communist threat as the basic threat. Thus, despite significant differences in Greece, the Philippines, and Vietnam, America basically pursued the same policy. The U.S. acted according to what it thought the foreign governments should do--strengthen the government, try to extend governmental influence to the peripheries, and allay discontent among the poor by enacting economic and democratic reform. In reality, regimes did the opposite of these things; governments became more centralized and totalitarian, often terrorizing the classes posing a threat, and the lot of the poor became even more destitute and powerless. Thankfully, other forces came into play in Greece and the Philippines, but Vietnam revealed the weakness of American strategy. Regrettably, as Shafer sees it, nothing really had changed by the time he wrote this book in the late 1980s. He shows that counterinsurgency thinking as revealed by the conference speakers at a major conference in 1986 repeated the same notions that lay behind previous failures.

The realist approach, positing that the U.S. acted based on events as they occurred, presidential politics, and bureaucratic politics theories all explain some aspects of American policy, but Shafer concludes that none of these by themselves accounts for America's actions and failures. He argues that only a cognitive content approach explains America's counterinsurgency policies, and only this theory identifies the source of our mistakes. He does make a strong case for the assertion that there are basic ideas which are wrong, short-sighted, and idealistic behind America's counterinsurgency thinking; these ideas are so basic and seemingly axiomatic that they have never been questioned. As a result, America continues to act based on things that "ought to" happen, and in the real world this fails completely. Only a detailed study of each situation, taking into account each foreign government's capacity and willingness to act, a realistic appraisal of that government's relationship to its own people, and a practical assessment of the leverage America can actually make use of, can lead to good policy in this realm. He is pessimistic that this will happen because government leaders as well as academic political scientists share the same wrong ideas and reinforce each other's mistakes by agreeing with one another. I do not have enough of a grasp on this subject to declare the author correct in his argument, but it does make a lot of sense and deserves serious consideration. Much of its arguments do seem to apply to the current war on terrorism, but unfortunately the author does not delve into religious fanaticism in Third World countries as part of his study