Sovereign Soldiers: How the U.S. Military Transformed the Global Economy after World War II.

• Author: Madsen, Grant

Grant Madsen, an Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University, tackles the impact of U.S. armed forces in shaping economic and social policies in Germany and Japan following WWII in his scholarly book, Sovereign Soldiers: How the U.S. Military Transformed the Global Economy after World War II. In this book, Madsen assesses the economic policies of the military governments established in these two countries and discusses American policy with a special focus on army commanders.

The author presents military generals, namely Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas Mac Arthur as the representatives of an external state which is the U.S., respectively in Germany and Japan. These American generals are the leaders of the military regimes operating outside the territories of the U.S. but still depend on Washington. The author borrows the concept of 'external state' from political theorist Robert Latham; according to Lantman, an external state is "more than an external face to the state," and can be thought of as "the organs that are literally situated and deployed in the external realm" and "distinct not only from the internal state" but also from "those institutions which command authority over the deployment process itself, the state center" (p. 7).

This perspective is contrary to the understanding that foreign policy-making is the purview of a unitary state. Based on the conceptualizations of the academic arguments he deploys, Madsen defends the actions of the American state in its occupations as having been determined by the prompt answers of U.S. military commanders; these elites take actions based on their own understandings, instincts, and subjective foresights, rather than following a roadmap dictated by a central authority, in this case, Washington, as a unitary actor.

Madsen arranges his historical framework in a way that contrasts with the commonly accepted narratives of American foreign policy; he remains distant from the well-known label of 'empire-building,' which has been used to characterize American occupation strategies. He also approaches another commonly argued narrative with caution, specifically the one that regards American foreign policy as an outcome of the interests of strong business and political interest groups. Madsen argues that this way of thinking is not sufficient to understand the foreign policymaking of the U.S. following WWII in Germany and Japan. The author gives a retrospective account of the U.S. military...