In Seeds of Stability: Land Reform and US Foreign Policy, Ethan Kapstein successfully offers a theoretically ambitious and policy-relevant study of Washington’s efforts to promote stability in pro-Western governments during the Cold War and beyond by pushing the local leaders to adopt land reform. The author, drawing also on his expertise as senior director for research at the McCain Institute for International Leadership in Washington, DC, compellingly argues that the structure of the local political economy is the most important variable for the success or failure of various US Cold War programs in Asia, the Middle East, or Latin America.

Building on a rich scholarly literature and the various works of Judith Goldstein, Daron Acemoglu, and James Robinson, among others, Kapstein’s study further advances the discipline’s understanding of the connection between external efforts to promote land reform and the desired outcome of political stability and economic prosperity by testing several distinct hypotheses. The theoretical framework of the study links ideas/causal beliefs (such as grievance theory) with inputs defined as foreign aid programs, leading to outputs (land reform), and eventually the desired outcome (e.g., political stability of Western governments; p. 6).

More specifically, this study examines whether it is indeed the case, as the previous literature would indicate, that land reforms would be most effective where local elites were least dependent on agricultural rents, landowners were not very influential in political life, and the regime was democratic. The author, following case study methodology, finds mixed results for these contentions, although overall the book does conclude that, at least as far as the structure of the local political economy is concerned, we can determine that to be a key variable, even if not always in the expected way that previous literature would suggest. This is convincing as far as it goes, but I wished for a bit more clarity on the part of the author and less hedging on the theoretical implications of the mixed results of his empirical chapters.

Kapstein uses two main theoretical vehicles to drive his study: the grievance theory literature from the field of comparative politics and what he elaborates here as a reformist intervention strategy that largely incorporates ideas from the field of US foreign policy analysis. One of his most important theoretical contributions is showing that US policy makers during the Cold War “turned to grievance theory as a framework that shaped their causal beliefs” (p. 53). The main idea behind this theory was that poverty and economic inequality led to political instability, which in turn rendered Third World countries vulnerable to Soviet and communist propaganda and even to potential communist-leaning revolutions. Therefore, the argument went, in addition to the provision of military aid such as that called for in the famous Truman Doctrine strategy, US government officials believed “domestic reforms could counteract the communist threat” (p. 52). This belief led to the adoption of what Kapstein labels “reformist intervention.”

In delineating the strategy of reformist intervention, the author follows established work by Macdonald in defining it as “the active attempt by one state to alter the domestic politics of other states… [by] the manipulation of the cost-benefit calculations of decision-makers in target states in a future direction preferred by decision-makers in the recipient state” (p. 73). Kapstein refines this definition slightly by broadening the targets of intervention to encompass the country’s “elites” inside and outside government. Unlike earlier literature that focused on whether the host state is democratic or authoritarian, this book instead focuses on the “economic structure of elites” to determine whether the donor state adopting reformist intervention succeeds in its goals. The reforms analyzed in this study are limited to land reforms; more specifically, the author emphasizes redistributive policies as a key theoretical variable.

How well do the case studies support the book’s hypotheses? Kapstein examines land reform efforts across four eras and places: early Cold War efforts in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Italy; later counterinsurgency-focused efforts in the Philippines and South Vietnam; the mix of land reform and revolutions in Latin America from 1950s through the 1980s; and the particular case of Iran in the 1950s and 1960s during the Shah’s ill-fated efforts at economic reform. The overall evidence is admittedly mixed (pp. 249–50), but the author is convincing in arguing that at least the main theoretical proposition is well supported by the empirical analysis: “where elite assets were highly concentrated in land and incomes were thus dependent upon agricultural rents, as in Vietnam, El Salvador, and Guatemala…reform was more difficult to implement and the process more violent than in countries where elite assets were more diversified, as in Venezuela and Taiwan” (p .251). Having said that, the book would be even more convincing if Kapstein would have structured the case studies more similarly and been more explicit in the research design concerning how he intended to examine the theory’s predictions in each of the cases.

Policy relevance and outlining policy recommendations for current and future US government attempts at “reformist intervention” are key parts of this book, as the author makes clear on more than one occasion. He contends that, to maintain or restore the post–World War II liberal world order, the United States will have to try to continue to “win hearts and minds,” and therefore the connection between “economic reform” and “national security” will remain a key pillar of US foreign aid policy (p. 247). To make such efforts more successful than was the case in the recent ill-fated efforts at reform in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kapstein points to three conclusions: first, he warns that reform can be destabilizing; second, expertise and the time horizons of policy makers are crucial; and third, the coherence of the policy is very important. Although these three principles may seem quite intuitive and noncontroversial for most government and policy experts, the author nevertheless makes a useful contribution to the policy literature by providing further empirical evidence to support them.

But is US foreign policy post-COVID really going back to an era of concern with funding and promoting internal economic reform in faraway places, as was the case during the Cold War and the War on Terror, in the name of anticommunism or antiterrorism, respectively? While a few expert voices in Washington might call for it, it seems fairly unlikely that either the American public, Congress, or most of the members of the Biden administration would push US priorities in that direction. The main grand strategic challenge faced by Washington is the rise of high-end military, economic, and technological competition with China, but even a “new Cold War” between the US and China is not likely to spur the kind of interest in reforming poor client states, as did the original Cold War against the USSR. Therefore, although this book certainly makes a valuable contribution to understanding the mechanisms when such reformist strategies might be effective, the demand and appetite for such interventions on Washington’s part in the coming future are likely to be very limited.