Fixing failed states: a cure worse than the disease?

The bipartisan Beltway consensus that sponsored the Iraq war is in the uncomfortable and unfamiliar position of having to justify its most basic tenets. After the Washington foreign policy community all but unanimously assured Americans of the prudence and necessity of starting a war with Iraq, other articles of faith in foreign policy circles are coming under attack. Perhaps most pernicious among them is the consensus view that the United States must reconstitute its national security bureaucracy in order to develop the capacity to fix failed states.

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The fetish for fixing failed states is found in Democrats and Republicans alike. Take, for one example, former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger's 2005 article in The National Interest titled "In the Wake of War." There, Scowcroft and Berger assure us that "action to stabilize and rebuild states emerging from conflict is not 'foreign policy as social work,' a favorite quip of the 1990s. It is equally a national security priority."

This is argument by assertion. A better-founded argument would at least go to the trouble of defining its terms. Alas, any attempt to define terms would also demonstrate the unconvincing nature of the thesis. Failed states rarely present threats to the United States, and attempting to "fix" them portends serious problems for US policy. To assess whether or not failed states pose a threat to US national security, we must first define "state failure" and then examine the historical cases that meet that definition.

Failure Is in the Eye of the Beholder

The most comprehensive and analytically rigorous study of state failure was a task force report commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Intelligence in 2000. The report's authors sought to quantify and examine episodes of state failure between 1955 and 1998. Working from their first definition of state failure (when "central state authority collapses for several years"), the authors only found 20 cases of bona fide state failure--too small a number to produce statistically significant conclusions. As a result, the authors chose to broaden the definition. After establishing those new criteria, the authors found 114 cases of state failure between 1955 and 1998.

The new methodology increased the number of failed states nearly sixfold by changing the definition of what constituted state failure. Although the authors made the change to achieve a degree of statistical significance, they contended that the new methodology was appropriate because "events that fall beneath [the] total-collapse threshold often pose challenges to US foreign policy as well." That speculative and highly subjective standard produced a list that characterized China, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Israel, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, and Turkey as failed states as of December 1998. A data set that includes such disparate countries does little to inform US policy toward failed states. It is less useful as a heuristic for guiding national policy than is blithely declaring that "states that begin with the letter I pose challenges to US foreign policy."

More recent efforts offer little encouragement. A 2007 update of the Fund for Peace/Foreign Policy magazine "Failed States Index" promises on the magazine's cover to explain "why the world's weakest countries pose the greatest danger." In what can only be described as false advertising, the article does little to prove or even argue this claim. It instead concedes that "failing states are a diverse lot" and that "there are few easy answers to their troubles." But since the concept of "failedness" tells us so little about these states, why assemble such a category at all? One could imagine any number of arbitrary distinctions that would group together less disparate states than those that receive the designation "failed." Still, with the problem diagnosed as failure, the proposal is to fix the failure. To do so requires an interventionist US stance.

"We're From the US Government, Here to Help"

Despite the vacuity of the concept of state failure, some scholars have been working from the assumption that we should embark on a policy of fixing failed states. Indeed, some students of international politics have moved far beyond advocating for the placement of state failure as the center of US national security policy. Many advocate moving away from the Westphalian system of national sovereignty that has prevailed since 1648.

Stephen D. Krasner, the current director of the US State Department's policy planning staff and a leading advocate for nation building, argued in International Security in 2004 that the "rules of conventional sovereignty ... no longer work, and their inadequacies have had deleterious consequences for the strong as well as the weak." Krasner concluded that, to resolve that dilemma, "alternative institutional arrangements supported by external actors, such as de facto trusteeships and shared sovereignty, should be added to the list of policy options." He was explicit about the implications of those policies, admitting that "international actors would assume control over local functions for an indefinite period of time. They might also eliminate the international legal sovereignty of the entity or control treaty-making powers in whole or in part." And make no mistake, as Krasner admits: "There would be no assumption of a withdrawal in the short or medium term."

According to James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, political science professors at Stanford University, the new doctrine "may be described as neotrusteeship, or more provocatively, postmodern imperialism." Also writing in International Security in 2004, Fearon and Laitin protested that this imperialism should not carry the stigma of nineteenth or twentieth-century imperialism. As they argue,"[W]e are not advocating or endorsing imperialism with the connotation of exploitation and permanent rule by foreigners." On the contrary, Fearon and Laitin explain that "postmodern imperialism may have exploitative aspects, but these are to be condemned."

While perhaps not intentionally exploitative, postmodern imperialism certainly does appear to entail protracted and perhaps permanent rule by foreigners. Fearon and Laitin admit that, in postmodern imperialism, "the search for an exit strategy is delusional, if this means a plan under which full control of domestic security is to be handed back to local authorities by a certain date in the near future." However, "for some cases, complete exit by the interveners may never be possible." In contrast, the endgame is "to make the national level of government irrelevant for people in comparison to the local and supranational levels." Thus, in Fearon and Laitin's model, the term "nation building" may not be the most appropriate description. Their ideas would more accurately be described as "nation ending," or the replacement of national governments with a supranational governing order.

Some supporters of a forward-leaning posture on failed states do not share Fearon and Laitin's aversion to imperial nomenclature. Jeffrey E. Garten, dean of the Yale School of Management, took to the pages of Foreign Policy in 2003 to call on Washington to establish a colonial office. His call has been echoed frequently--though often couched in mushy language--ever since. And perhaps the most forthright proponent of American empire, Max Boot, has written candidly on the importance of developing a nation building capacity to repair and revive failed states in the future. Similarly, the influential journalist Robert Kaplan has written about the importance of inserting ourselves into far-flung corners of the globe to build governing capacity.

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Does State Failure Threaten America?

Anti-sovereignty academics and pro-empire Beltway pundits frequently defend their arguments by making assertions along the lines that "weak and failed states pose an acute risk to US and global security," as Carlos Pascual, the US State Department's first Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, and Stephen Krasner wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2005. This is a rather dubious claim. The Fund for Peace/Foreign Policy magazine Failed States Index, for example, includes on its top 10 "most failed" states list Zimbabwe, Chad, Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, and the Central African Republic. It is difficult to imagine what threats are emerging from these countries that merit significant attention from US security strategists.

To be sure, Afghanistan in the late 1990s was both a failed state by any definition and a threat to the United States. It should serve as a pointed reminder that we cannot ignore failed states. Traditional realist definitions of power reliant on conventional military capability, size of economy, and population, must now be supplemented with a recognition that small bands of terrorists could emerge from a backward corner of the globe and strike at the heart of the United States as well.

But even here the interventionists' logic is weak. Attacking the threat that resided in failed Afghanistan in the 1990s would have had basically no effect on the health of the Afghan state. Killing Osama bin Laden and his comrades would have more substantially reduced the threat that bloomed on 9/11 than sending in US or international development personnel would have done. Attacking a threat rarely involves paving roads or establishing new judicial standards.