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 >>/54291/
cont.
For routine client maintenance I can separate three tools the US has:
1. economic assistance, advisors, often loans, from banks or multilateral ones, World Bank and IMF;
2. military assistance, basically equipping and training client militaries, sending advisors;
3. political assistance, advisors, propaganda can think of as low key as publishing nice news about the client regime in Reuters, CNN, etc regularly, telling how great relations are, and how well the client regime is doing, which the client's media can take and essentially translate; these days, especially with social media, everything is more connected then ever
For client maintenance interventions the book lists five tools (and now I'm quoting the followin):
1. emergency economic aid, mostly in the form of emergency loans and advice;
2. emergency covert political aid, mostly in the form of propaganda, material assistance to political parties, and encouragement of coups and insurrections;
3. emergency military aid;
4. U.S. ground troops;
5. proxy military forces (perhaps aided by U.S. air power).
The first three are essentially the same as above, except in a short term, quick, emergency form.

One point of the book is that the US has limited set of means to use in foreign politics. She really does.

For interventions the book gives the following summary and statistics:
Out of 89 current or former clients in 35 the US had to intervene, all in all 68 times. Certain countries seen more than one interventions. These numbers are conservative, and don't cover all the instances of emergency aids, excludes cases when the US only encouraged others to intervene, or when the actions were too covert to know about. So this is a minimum number.
From the 16 types of interventions:
- 3 emergency assistance;
- 4 combat forces;
- 5 overthrowing or jettisoning leaders;
- 2 client lost or intervention wasn't feasible;
- 2 liquidating troop deployment.
From the 68 interventions:
- 33 nonmilitary;
- 8 emergency military aid and advisers;
- 28 US or proxy combat forces.
From this 28, in 24 cases the US used her own ground combat troops overtly.

The other point the authors make is that they explain the US actions by the available tools. In many cases the US intervenes militarily, she does it because that is the available tool. The army was always something they can use to solve a certain problem, so the US policy makers take it "off the shelf" and use it.
Especially in the early days when they have little else but the marines to send into small southern neighbours. They opted with military solutions because they only had that.
In the past 100 years, since they started out, they developed new tools, such as economic assistance with IMF, or with the CIA covert operations and such. But all in all the number of tools is small.