John Clune's slim volume attempts to cover the political history of American assistance to Ghana and the Ghanaian military's embrace and repackaging of that aid for export, while it also explores how travel helped to internationalize the worldview of Ghana's military personnel. Clune's mastery of American foreign policy literature and his use of archival sources, both in the United States and Ghana, make this work an illuminating examination of American policy in Africa during the Cold War. However, the scope he attempts to cover is too broad for a volume of only 172 pages (excluding notes). As a result, his discussion of the effect of American policies on shaping Ghanaian officers’ worldview in the wake of their participation in various initiatives, such as the International Military Education & Training (IMET) program, falls short of the mark he sets for himself.

In the first two chapters, Clune explores the early years of Ghanaian military cooperation with the United States. Like many recently decolonized British countries, the Ghanaian military relied on a largely British officer corps at independence. Ghana's president, Kwame Nkrumah, sought to create in the new Ghanaian military both a means to promote nationalism and to export his particular view of Pan-Africanism. The Americans, eager for African allies in the Cold War, were eager to support Nkrumah with officer training, as well as to assist in the establishment of Ghana's officer training school. Clune emphasizes the importance of American support for Ghana's military, and the enthusiasm of Ghanaians for the military aid they received for their own missions abroad, by showing that both American and Ghanaian visions adhered to the ‘modernization’ ideology that was prevalent in the early years of decolonization. For the Americans, British, and Canadians, military assistance was no different from other infrastructure-building enterprises, such as the Volta dam; all these projects would help create a stable and pro-western government. Interestingly, American support for Ghana's military education did not change even after the coups of 1966 and 1972.

Chapter Three examines Ghanaian peacekeeping missions, and cites experiences reported in several memoirs and other writings to explore how these missions changed Ghanaian officers’ perceptions of their place in society, while it also considers whether these experiences instilled in those officers a broader understanding of their place as global actors.

Chapter Four investigates Ghana's place within the United States’ review of its IMET program, the cornerstone program in America's involvement with Ghana's military. Ghana was especially important in American thinking because of the prevalence of coups in the country, some of which were led by IMET graduates, such as Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, who himself was deposed in 1978 in a coup led by Frederick Akuffo. Akuffo was killed along with Acheampong less than a year later in the first coup that Jerry Rawlings orchestrated. This chapter uses Ghana as a case study to examine American scrutiny of IMET throughout this tumultuous period.

The book falls short on two very important levels. First, although Clune is well-versed in the political historiography, he does not engage the social history of the African military experience. African military leaders and soldiers have a long history of foreign intervention and education and much research discusses how these factors left an indelible imprint on African societies, especially in the colonial and postcolonial experience. Books like Michelle Moyd's Violent Intermediaries (2014), Timothy Stapleton's No Insignificant Part (2006) and David Killingray's Fighting for Britain (2010) go unmentioned in the assessment (though some of Killingray's earlier work is cited), and at times it seems that Clune is reinventing the wheel when he refers to the African side of his argument. Similarly, the chapter on Ghana's involvement in peacekeeping operations is based on a few memoirs and various magazine articles. It is puzzling that Clune used these kinds of sources because Ghanaian peacekeepers have taken part in missions organized by the United Nations and African Union (and its predecessor organization) since the Congo mission in 1960, and there is much primary and secondary work on the subject. Also, since the chapter strays from the rest of the book's theme, it feels extraneous; Clune could have omitted it here and developed it into a separate work.

The Abongo Abroad provides an in-depth investigation of American policies aimed at one of the more influential African countries, at least symbolically, in the early postcolonial years. Clune provides a much-needed addition to the military side of American international policymaking during the Cold War years. However, the manner in which Clune included Ghana's peacekeeping experiences coupled with the lackadaisical research and discussion of the African side of the equation make his work less relevant as a study of transformations in African military attitudes during the same period.