Book Reviews--The United States and Ethiopia: Military Assistance and the Quest for Security, 1953-1993 by Baffour Agyeman-Duah

Baffour Agyeman-Duah's study joins a number of recent monographs on the relationship between superpower patronage and client state behavior in the horn of Africa. Robert B. Patman's The Soviet Union in the horn of Africa (Cambridge, 1990) focused on Moscow's perceptions and motives and Jeffrey lefebvre's study Arms for the Horn (Pittsburgh, 1991) looked at Washington's use of arms to shape relations with both Ethiopia and Somalia. Agyeman-Duah's purpose seems to be to add to this literature in two ways; first, by supplementing the overall historical account with a detailed narrative based on primary documents of the United States Ethiopian relationship from 1954 to 1977; and second, to use the US-Ethiopia case to develop conceptual ideas such as the relationship between militarization and the "soft state" in Africa. He largely succeeds on the first goal but fails to deliver fully on the second. Agyeman-Duah's account is best when he follows his primary sources closely and is less convincing when he extrapolates beyond his data.