NBN Book Review Podcast of With Us and Against Us by Stephen Tankel
STEPHEN TANKEL
With Us and Against Us
How America’s
Partners Help and Hinder the War on Terror
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 2018
new
books network podcast by james m. dorsey
10
August 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.
LISTEN TO PODCAST
AT http://newbooksnetwork.com/stephen-tankel-with-us-and-against-us-how-americas-partners-help-and-hinder-the-war-on-terror-columbia-up-2018/
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School
of International Studies.
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