| My dissertation investigates American militarized state-building projects. The essential question motivating my research is why has America succeeded in rebuilding some states after military intervention, but failed in others. Why, for example, did the United States succeed in rebuilding West Germany after World War II, but fail to rebuild South Vietnam? To answer this question, I adopted a qualitative case-study method where I conducted a structured focused comparison of three cases of American militarized state-building projects: West Germany, South Korea and South Vietnam. The outcome of interest investigated in the dissertation is the degree of American success in each project five years after the American withdrawal of its armed forces from the target country. To account for this outcome of interest I developed a theoretical framework employing a process-tracing technique to account for the variation in the degree of success. I derived this framework from the literature on American nation-building projects and the archival research I conducted in three presidential libraries. The findings reported in the dissertation identify three independent variables: the United States' ability to create a safe and secure environment in a target state, the duration of the American presence, and the United States alliance with national political forces in a target state. Each of these variables is individually necessary to any successful militarized state-building venture, only together are they sufficient in accounting for most successes. |
