This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 21st, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The United States has made some pretty unsavory deals with some pretty awful regimes, often with

few benefits for U.S. security. That's the message of the new Cato book Parilous Partners

by Ted Gailen Carpenter and Maloo Innocent. I spoke with Carpenter about the book yesterday.

The book looks at the basic dilemma that the United States as a democratic country faces in defending its security interests

and deciding when it is necessary to make alliances with authoritarian regimes, with friendly dictators. with

friendly dictators.

And what we've concluded is that

there are occasions when such compromises may be necessary,

but US leaders have been far too casual about that.

That we have made common cause close alliances with sometimes odious regimes when only marginal US interests were at stake.

And that we then betrayed fundamental American values in doing that.

And where were American values leased at stake when we chose a most

odious partner? I would say the worst case was the U relationship with Joseph Mobutu, Mobutu Secco, the dictator of

Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The United States had minimal interests

at stake in sub-Saharan Africa, yet we saw the developments in that region

entirely through the prism of the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union.

So we ended up supporting Mobutu for better than three decades, while he brutalized political opponents and looted the country to the tune of billions of dollars.

So we helped impoverish an already poor country and help fasten a brutal corrupt dictatorship on the population

of that country.

What was the upside for the United States?

...