Ronn Pineo, Ecuador and the United States: Useful Strangers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), pp. xiii+260, $24.95, pb.
he asks poignantly, ‘Did anyone benefit from these prolonged conflicts ? ’ (p. 159). Authoritarian regimes were replaced by nominally democratic ones, but good governance was still hard to find and the social problems that gave rise to the conflicts in the first place have yet to be redressed. Greentree wants the reader to take away from the Central American experience a better understanding of just how complex, difficult and costly even small wars can be. He hopes to inoculate future policymakers against grandiose theories about how they can and should use military force to transform the world in the image of the United States. We should wish him every success.