The streets of Haiti, image by Susan Mohr.

Senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington D.C., Jake Johnston, is the author of Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti (Saint Martin’s Press, 2024). He was the premier analyst for the center’s “Haiti Relief and Reconstruction Watch website since 2010, just weeks after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti.” Originally from Portland ME, and now residing in Washington D.C., Johnston has contributed to the New York Times, The Nation, The Boston Review, and The Intercept.Journalist and author Naomi Klein praised Johnston for his “stubborn commitment to tracking Haiti’s struggles for a just recovery and real democracy — and his deft narrative and investigative skills.” Yale historian Greg Grandin remarked that “Aid State is a harrowing journey into the heart of modern neocolonial darkness, revealing the thick network of international organizations, including The United Nations, that have occupied Haiti for decades.” And professor of French and African American studies at Yale, Marlene L. Daut, stated that the book “should be required reading for all world leaders before they even think about meddling in Haitian politics — challenging popular notions of what it means to best support Haiti and with decades-long experience reporting on Haitian affairs to support his shrewd analysis, [the author] dismantles the idea that aid after disaster has anything to do with humanitarianism.”

In his Prologue, Johnston makes an interesting comparison in terms of American foreign policy. He cites Jonathan M. Katz and the disasters in Afghanistan and Haiti. Katz wrote a piece about their “shared twisted roots” in The New Republic in August of 2021. “Half a world away from one another, the citizens of two nations are suffering as a result of the corruption and incompetence of the United States,” detailed Katz. Johnston wrote that, “on their surface the events appeared distinct and unrelated, [although] the earthquake in Haiti and the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan revealed a deeper commonality. After the fall of Kabul, Washington’s foreign policy establishment lit up with experts asking and answering the question of ‘why nation building in Afghanistan had failed so miserably?’ But few seem to be wondering the same about Haiti.”

Johnston’s argument essentially is that too many scholars refer to Haiti as a “failed state” without putting forth the more accurate description and designation of what Haiti truly is in the eyes of the U.S., an aid state. Haiti has been presented as a case study in receipt of liberal humanitarianism when it’s been a “peace keeping” laboratory for institutional capital and first world exploitation. The country is in a state of emergency.

The opening chapter, “The Compassionate Invasion,” is a reference to Mark Thompson’s January 2010 article in Time entitled, “The U.S. Military in Haiti: The Compassionate Invasion.” The first couple of chapters serve as a literature review of sorts. For instance, in the second chapter, “The Fear,” Johnston critiques David Brooks and his harsh and ahistorical analysis of Haiti as a place with “progress-resistant cultural influences.” More helpful and accurate, however, was Rebecca Solnit’s work that elaborated on Caron Chess and Lee Clarke’s concept of “elite panic.” Johnston stated it as a “term coined by disaster researchers more than fifty years earlier into the mainstream.” Also, in his third chapter for example, “The Blue Helmets,” Johnston references the work of The Associated Press as well as CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and his exchange with Colin Powell — a person “intimately involved in planning two large scale military operations in Haiti — once under a Democrat, Bill Clinton, and once under a Republican, George W. Bush.”

Johnston revisits the story of the infamously twice-abducted, Creole-speaking, populist-priest and president – the great Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the inner workings of U.S. involvement in his kidnapping “for his own safety.” These incidents served as microcosms for how Western actors have historically failed Haiti more than they have provided stability in the hemisphere. Johnston is basically arguing that aid serves as a distortion and produces a phenomenon whereby elites are held unaccountable.

Stability is an overused Orwellian term that downplays an actual militarized response by the West. The author wants to know how much development and aid money gets into the hands of those in need in Haiti and what percentage of earthquake funding from Washington D.C. is in reality a front for private contracting. How much aid goes to the Haitian government in raw percentage numbers? Are U.S. interests in Haiti simply a renewed version of Smedley Butler’s “gangster capitalism?”

In essence, yes, Johnston’s findings mirror Butler’s mind-blowing conclusions. The percentage of earthquake capital and aid from Washington and its contractors to NGOs/IGOs (Chapters 6 &7) far exceeds the amount of humanitarian aid that makes its way to the Haitian people/government. This “cashing in” of the disaster capitalism infrastructure and elite aid defines the Johnston schema. Ultimately, it’s about developed countries controlling underdeveloped countries.

An important section of the book is where he further discusses “The Aid Industrial Complex” as Johnston uses important primary source material that breaks down the role of the Monsanto company, which prompted a form of seed sovereignty resistance. He also asserted the bipartisan responsibility for the plight of Haiti whether under a Republican or Democratic administration. President Clinton, initially elected as a “New Democrat,” ultimately apologized for trade policies that destroyed Haitian rice farming. In essence, whether it was the realpolitik of neocon Presidents Bush I and II, or the nuanced free market fantasies of the neoliberal and idealist-in-chief Clinton, Haiti felt the structural violence of U.S. trade policies.

He further accentuates this historical point in his seventh chapter on the “Transition Initiative.” Here, Johnston cites more important primary source documents and data. It includes John F. Kennedy’s Address Before the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 25, 1961, Lyndon Johnson’s documents regarding Foreign Relations with Haiti (1964-1968), and Ronald Reagan’s Address to Parliament tackling “democracy.” All this data collected by Johnston indicates the tendency for Washington to remain loyal to or restricted by its own path dependence when it comes to dealing with a failed state like Haiti. American power and the office of the presidency usually reverts to what Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Los Angeles Times in March 2004, “From His First Day in Office, Bush Was Ousting Aristide.”

Some of the book’s greatest strengths are its fast-moving pace in covering twenty-nine chapters, ability to summarize the limitations of U.S. electoral politics, the significance of “statistical coups,” presidential commissions and slogans, and the importance of history and diplomacy (see Chapters 9-12). Johnston cleverly weaves the importance of geopolitics and history in colonial legacies and “reveals how U.S. and European capitalist goals re-enslaved Haiti under the guise of helping it.” He reminds the reader that historically, Haiti has been a place where the workforce can be exploited and the government officials malleable. Aid is a format and template for profit making and “earthquakes and hurricanes only further hurt a state, already decimated by the aid industrial complex.”

His work related to The Shock Doctrine and disaster capitalism reminded me of comparisons made elsewhere in the world. During Hurricane Katrina, for example, international relations scholar Stephen Zunes once explained how the U.S. was unable to deal with the disaster in New Orleans because the Bush administration had sent their National Guard to Iraq to fight an illegal war for profit. Similarly, Zunes also pointed to Morocco, a place unable to tend to its own human relief concerns after the 2023 earthquake. In this case, its military and service people were illegally occupying the Western Sahara.

Further, legal scholar Richard Falk once indicated that Turkey and Syria were compromised architecturally, since politicians such as Erdogan had relaxed requirements on inspection. When development is not seen as a robust extension of human freedom, or notions advanced by Zunes and Falk, or people like Elaine Bernard and Amartya Sen, earthquakes can test the nature of the government’s ability to value real stability.

In other words, as Johnston points out, Haiti is faced with a quadruple-whammy of human rights abuses, one that can be traced through the lenses of human rights, power, development, and peace and conflict. The United States exercises hard and soft power whereas Haiti cannot. The United States has a history of development essentially in terms of exploiting the underdeveloped as referenced by Andre Gunder Frank. The U.S. also has a very problematic record in terms of human rights abroad and resolving peace and conflict in meaningful and substantial ways with Haiti.

In my estimation, some of the additional strengths of the book are also its drawbacks. For one thing, books that are published as trade press books, although scholarly, and for wider popular audiences are on the one hand accessible, but on the other, in need of a more specialized academic and singular focus. In other words, I like how the book outlines many themes and utilizes more than one discipline. It toggles between history/geopolitics and a critique of American foreign policy/economics. The disadvantage of this approach is that it’s critiquing American involvement in Haiti mostly from the top down, when it also needs to focus on more of a bottom-up approach.

That is to say, the Haitian elite society needs to be understood from a historical and anthropological lens. As the scholar Talal Asad might allude to elsewhere, after the French were kicked out, the Haitian elite saw an opportunity and were no longer the same people. For many on the left, decolonization tends to create binaries among states where it shouldn’t. After colonization, the formerly colonized did not simply and happily revert to existing as the cultural beings they were before colonization. They were culturally changed beings, susceptible to the attraction of dominant tastes and desires and dominant modalities of power.

And as such, post-colonial Haitians are not any different from other people in global capitalist modernity. Furthermore, the Haitian elite society is in fact supremely modern, and its founding constituency has revealed this. Haiti is, as Haitian scholar Philippe-Richard Marius specifies, an example of modern bourgeois capitalist modernity. Even in the midst of the horrific gang control, the country’s socio-political and economic elite has come up with a supremely rational and modern solution to political instability at the state level. They now have a system of presidential rotation, the so-called “presidential council” whereby nine members rotate in the presidency for three months at a time.

This has taken care of the problem of incessant coups – for now the political elite doesn’t have to worry about presidents being overthrown nor about governing. Now it can focus on what the Haitian state was intended to do, enrich the handful who make it to the top — and a little less for their vassals on the next few rungs of power below. The republic is not as exceptional as we on the left would like it to be.

Johnston certainly comments on Haiti’s own problems with internal elite mechanisms. He does criticize Haitian governance aside from American and Western involvement and Rene Preval in Chapter 8’s, “The Dispensable Man,” but more so as a departure instead of the Republic’s origins rooted in militarized agriculture. But when you take a stricter class analysis of the situation, if this is a system burdened by gangs and fragility drivers making it impossible to govern and rule, it’s also a state nowhere near the point of collapse from the standpoints of the powerful and economically privileged. I, like Johnston, see the value of interrogating the Core Group and Westerners that devastated Haiti. But I also feel I’m at times, doing what I do best, “standing with Haiti” and the marginalized elsewhere in the world, when I should be applying a more thoughtful and intellectual class analysis internally.

Nevertheless, Johnston’s work on Haiti at the crossroads is excellent, and his book is well-written, especially when you follow it from the context and trajectory of the harmful nature of American imperialism, capitalism and exceptionality. Johnston stands on the shoulders of other reputable scholars of the past in regards to Haiti — great thinkers and activists such as Noam Chomsky, Paul Farmer and Danny Glover. It is not so simple to pull off what Johnston has accomplished: 1) covering the historical roots of criminality in the first six chapters, 2) the criminalization of leadership in the middle chapters, and 3) elite conflict escalation at the end of the book — all difficult academic tasks to balance.

Haiti has often been a place in need of a Marxist critique and class analysis from the left. This requirement probably extends much more broadly to other pertinent readings like Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara and even My Fourth Time, We Drowned, a favorite work of mine, by Sally Hayden. Yes, capitalist institutions of the West and developed nations with military-might place power over development while aid infrastructure uses natural disasters to make money. But at the same time, we must come to grips with the fact that the mistreated countries of the world also possess a level of capitalist modernity in need of extensive and intensive scholarly criticism. If we fail to complicate it, it will become a reductionist proposition for the right to cynically exploit.

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