The Rise and Fall of the Failed-State Paradigm
Requiem for a Decade of Distraction
Foreign Affairs, January-February 2014
A broken globe in an abandoned school in Ukraine. (Fiona McAllister / Flickr)
For a decade and
a half, from the mid-1990s through about 2010, the dominant national security
narrative in the United States stressed the dangers posed by weak or failing
states. These were seen to breed terrorism, regional chaos, crime, disease, and
environmental catastrophe. To deal with such problems at their roots, the
argument ran, the United States had to reach out and help stabilize the
countries in question, engaging in state building on a neo-imperial scale. And
reach out the United States did -- most obviously during the protracted
campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.
After a decade
of conflict and effort with precious little to show for it, however, the recent
era of interventionist U.S. state building is drawing to a close. And although
there are practical reasons for this shift -- the United States can no longer
afford such missions, and the public has tired of them -- the decline of the
state-building narrative reflects a more profound underlying truth: the
obsession with weak states was always more of a mania than a sound strategic
doctrine. Its passing will not leave the United States more isolationist and
vulnerable but rather free the country to focus on its more important global
roles.
THE BIRTH OF A
PARADIGM
In the wake of
the Cold War, contemplating a largely benign security environment, many U.S.
national security strategists and practitioners concluded that the most
important risks were posed by the fragility of state structures and recommended
profound shifts in U.S. foreign and defense policy as a result. In an
interconnected world, they argued, chaos, violence, and grievances anywhere had
the potential to affect U.S. interests, and weak states were factories of such
volatility. Experiences in Somalia, Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia helped
fuel the concern, and by 1994, the CIA was funding a state-failure task force
to get a handle on the problem.
In 1997, the
Clinton administration released Presidential Decision Directive 56, “Managing
Complex Contingency Operations,” which began with the assertion that “in the
wake of the Cold War, attention has focused on a rising number of territorial
disputes, armed ethnic conflicts, and civil wars that pose threats to regional
and international peace.” A new focus of U.S. policy, accordingly, would be
responding to such situations with “multi-dimensional operations composed of
such components as political/diplomatic, humanitarian, intelligence, economic
development, and security.”
Critics of a
realist persuasion objected to the emerging narrative, arguing that the Clinton
administration’s forays into state building in peripheral areas represented a
strategic folly. And during his 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush ran
as the candidate of foreign policy humility, arguing in part that nation building
was a dangerous distraction. His adviser Condoleezza Rice grumbled that U.S.
troops should not be asked to escort toddlers to school; his vice presidential
candidate, Dick Cheney, suggested that a Bush administration would end U.S.
participation in Balkan operations; and the day before the election, Bush
himself declared, “Let me tell you what else I’m worried about: I’m worried
about an opponent who uses ‘nation building’ and ‘the military’ in the same
sentence.”
But the 9/11
attacks swept these hesitations aside, as the practical implications of an
interventionist “war on terror” became apparent. The first page of the Bush
administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy argued that “America is now
threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones. We are
menaced less by fleets and armies than by catastrophic technologies in the
hands of the embittered few.”
The new
consensus was bipartisan. The Democratic foreign policy hand Susan Rice, for
example, wrote in 2003 that Bush was “wise to draw attention to the significant
threats to our national security posed by failed and failing states.” Where the
right emphasized security and terrorism, the left added humanitarian concerns.
Development specialists jumped on the bandwagon as well, thanks to new studies
that highlighted the importance of institutions and good governance as
requirements for sustained economic success. In his 2004 book, State-Building,
the political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote, “Weak and failing states have
arguably become the single most important problem for international
order.” The Washington Posteditorialized the same year that “weak
states can compromise security -- most obviously by providing havens for
terrorists but also by incubating organized crime, spurring waves of migrants,
and undermining global efforts to control environmental threats and disease.”
This argument, the paper concluded, “is no longer much contested.” A year
later, the State Department’s director of policy planning, Stephen Krasner, and
its newly minted coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization, Carlos
Pascual, argued in these pages that “in today’s increasingly interconnected
world, weak and failed states pose an acute risk to U.S. and global security.
Indeed, they present one of the most important foreign policy challenges of the
contemporary era.”
From one angle,
the concern with weak states could be seen as a response to actual conditions
on the ground. Problems had always festered in disordered parts of the
developing world. Without great- power conflict as an urgent national security
priority, those problems were more clearly visible and harder to ignore. From
another angle, it could be seen as a classic meme -- a concept or intellectual
fad riding to prominence through social diffusion, articles by prominent
thinkers, a flurry of attention from the mainstream press, and a series of
foundation grants, think-tank projects, roundtables, and conferences.
From a third
angle, however, it could be seen as a solution to an unusual concern confronting
U.S. policymakers in this era: what to do with a surplus of national power. The
United States entered the 1990s with a dominant international position and no
immediate threats. Embracing a substantially reduced U.S. global role would
have required a fundamental reassessment of the prevailing consensus in favor
of continued primacy, something few in or around the U.S. national security
establishment were prepared to consider. Instead, therefore, whether
consciously or not, that establishment generated a new rationale for global
engagement, one involving the application of power and influence to issues that
at any other time would have been seen as secondary or tertiary. Without a
near-peer competitor (or several) to deter or a major war on the horizon,
Washington found a new foreign policy calling: renovating weak or failing
states.
THE DECLINE OF A
STRATEGIC NARRATIVE
The practical
challenges of state-building missions are now widely appreciated. They tend to
be long, difficult, and expensive, with success demanding an open-ended
commitment to a messy, violent, and confusing endeavor -- something unlikely to
be sustained in an era of budgetary austerity. But the last decade has driven
home intellectual challenges to the concept as well.
The threat posed
by weak and fragile states, for example, turned out to be both less urgent and
more complex and diffuse than was originally suggested. Foreign Policy’s
Failed States Index for 2013 is not exactly a roster of national security
priorities; of its top 20 weak states, very few (Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Pakistan) boast geostrategic significance, and they do so mostly because of
their connection to terrorism. But even the threat of terrorism isn’t highly
correlated with the current roster of weak states; only one of the top 20,
Sudan, appears on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism,
and most other weak states have only a marginal connection to terrorism at
best.
A lack of
definitional rigor posed a second problem. There has never been a coherent set
of factors that define failed states: As the political scientist Charles Call
argued in a powerful 2008 corrective, the concept resulted in the
“agglomeration of diverse criteria” that worked to “throw a monolithic cloak
over disparate problems that require tailored solutions.” This basic
methodological flaw would distort state-building missions for years, as outside
powers forced generic, universal solutions onto very distinct contexts.
The specified
dangers were never unique to weak states, moreover, nor would state-building
campaigns necessarily have mitigated them. Take terrorism. The most effective
terrorists tend to be products of the middle class, often from nations such as
Saudi Arabia, Germany, and the United Kingdom, not impoverished citizens of
failed states. And terrorist groups operating in weak states can shift their
bases of operations: if Afghanistan becomes too risky, they can uproot
themselves and move to Somalia, Yemen, or even Europe. As a result,
“stabilizing” three or four sources of extremist violence would not render the
United States secure. The same could be said of threats such as organized
crime, which finds comfortable homes in functioning but troubled states in
Asia, eastern Europe, and Latin America.
As the scholar
Stewart Patrick noted in a 2006 examination of the purported threats issuing
from weak states, “What is striking is how little empirical evidence underpins
these assertions and policy developments. Analysts and policymakers alike have
simply presumed the existence of a blanket connection between state weakness
and threats to the national security of developed countries and have begun to
recommend and implement policy responses.”
And although
interconnectedness and interdependence may create risks, the dangers in such a
world are more likely to come from strong, well-governed states with imperfect
regulations than weak ones with governance deficiencies. Financial volatility
that can shake the foundations of leading nations and cyberattacks that could
destabilize energy or information networks pose more immediate and persistent
risks than, say, terrorism.
A third problem
was misplaced confidence about the possibility of the mission’s feasibility.
The last decade has offered an extended, tragic reminder of the fact that
forcible state building simply cannot be accomplished by outsiders in any
sustainable or authentic way. When a social order has become maladapted to the
globalizing world -- when governing institutions are weak, personalized, or
kleptocratic; corruption is rampant; and the rule of law is noticeable by its
absence -- there are simply no proven methods for generating major social,
political, economic, or cultural change relatively quickly.
As the
Australian political scientist Michael Wesley argued in a brilliant 2008 essay,
state weakness is primarily a political problem, and yet state building is
often conceived and executed as if it were an apolitical exercise. “The
intention of remaining aloof from politics while concentrating on technocratic
reforms has proved unrealistic,” he wrote. “Even seemingly technocratic tasks
confront international administrators with essentially political decisions: the
nature and basis of elections; which pressure groups to consult; the
reintegration or de facto separation of ethnic communities; school curricula;
degrees of public ownership of enterprises; the status of women; and so on.
However technocratic their intention, state-building missions inevitably find
themselves factored into local rivalries.”
In trying to
force change on recalcitrant governments and societies, moreover, outside
interventions undermine internal motives for reform by transferring
responsibility for a better future from local leaders to external actors. The
outside power needs cooperation from its local clients more than they need its
sponsorship. The result is a dependency paradox that impedes reform. As success
stories from South Korea to Chile show, the path from state weakness to
strength has to be traveled by the states themselves, gradually and fitfully,
most often under the influence of strong, decisive leadership from visionary
architects of governance. It is an organic, grass-roots process that must
respect the unique social, cultural, economic, political, and religious
contexts of each country. And although it can be encouraged and even modestly
shaped by outside contributions and pressure, it cannot be imposed.
A fourth problem
with the state-building obsession was that it distorted the United States’
sense of its central purpose and role in global politics. Ever since World War
II, the United States has labored mightily to underwrite the stability of the
international system. It has done this by assembling military alliances to
protect its friends and deter its enemies, by helping construct a global
architecture of trade and finance, and by policing the global commons. These
actions have helped buttress an interdependent system of states that see their
dominant interests in stability rather than conquest.
Playing this
role well demands sustained attention at all levels of government, in part to
nurture the relationships essential to crisis management, diplomacy, and
multilateral cooperation of all kinds. Indeed, the leading danger in the
international system today is the peril that, assaulted by a dozen causes of
rivalry and mistrust, the system will fragment into geopolitical chaos. The
U.S. experience since the 1990s, and growing evidence from Northeast Asia,
suggests that if the relatively stable post–Cold War era devolves into
interstate rivalry, it will be not the result of weak states but that of the
escalating regional ambitions, bitter historical memories, and flourishing
nationalisms of increasingly competitive states. The U.S. role in counteracting
the broader trends of systemic disintegration is therefore critical. The United
States is the linchpin of a number of key alliances and networks; it provides the
leadership and attractive force for many global diplomatic endeavors, and its
dominant military position helps rule out thoughts of aggression in many
quarters.
The weak-state
obsession has drawn attention away from such pursuits and made a resurgence of traditional
threats more likely. Focusing on two seemingly endless wars and half a dozen
other potential “stability operations” has eroded U.S. global engagement,
diminished U.S. diplomatic creativity, and distracted U.S. officials from
responding appropriately to changes in the global landscape.
When one reads
the memoirs of Bush administration officials, the dozen or more leading global
issues beyond Afghanistan, Iraq, and the “war on terror” begin to sound like
background noise. Top U.S. officials appear to have spent far more time between
2003 and 2011, for example, managing the fractious mess of Iraqi politics than
tending to relationships with key global powers. As a consequence, senior U.S.
officials have had less time to cultivate the leaders of rising regional
powers, from Brazil to India to Turkey. Sometimes, U.S. actions or demands in
state-building adventures have directly undermined other important
relationships or diplomatic initiatives, as when Washington faced the global
political reaction to the Iraq war.
Such tradeoffs
reflect a hallmark of the era of state building: secondary issues became
dominant ones. To be fair, this was partly the fault of globalization;
around-the-clock media coverage now constantly shoves problems a world away
onto the daily agendas of national leaders. Combined with the United States’
self-image as the indispensable nation, this intrusive awareness created
political pressure to act on issues of limited significance to core U.S.
interests. Yet this is precisely the problem: U.S. perceptions of global
threats and of the country’s responsibility to address them have become badly
and perhaps permanently skewed. A great power’s reservoir of strategic
attention is not infinite. And the United States has become geopolitically
hobbled, seemingly uninterested in grand strategic initiatives or
transformative diplomacy, as its attention constantly dances from one crisis to
another.
A fifth problem
flowed directly from the fourth. To perform its global stabilizing role, the
United States needs appropriately designed, trained, and equipped armed forces
-- forces that can provide a global presence, prevail in high-end conflict
contingencies, enable quick long-range strike and interdiction capabilities,
and build and support local partners’ capacities. The state-building mission
has skewed the operations, training, equipping, and self-conception of the U.S.
military in ways that detract from these responsibilities.
Much of the U.S.
military has spent a decade focusing on state building and counterinsurgency
(COIN), especially in its training and doctrine, to the partial neglect of more
traditional tasks. Massive investments have gone into COIN-related equipment,
such as the MRAP (mine-resistant, ambush-protected) vehicles built to protect
U.S. troops from improvised explosive devices, draining billions of dollars
from other national security resources. The result of these choices has been to
weaken the U.S. military’s ability to play more geostrategic and, ultimately,
more important roles. Between a demanding operational tempo, the requirements
of refitting between deployments, and a shift in training to emphasize COIN,
the U.S. military, especially its ground forces, lost much of its proficiency
in full-spectrum combat operations. Simply put, the U.S. military would be far
better positioned today -- better aligned with the most important roles for
U.S. power, better trained for its traditional missions, better equipped for an
emerging period of austerity -- had the state-building diversion never
occurred.
AN ALTERNATIVE
MODEL
None of this is
meant to suggest that a concern for the problems posed by weak or failing
states can or should disappear entirely from the U.S. foreign policy and
national security agendas. Counterterrorism and its associated tasks will
surely remain important, and across the greater Middle East -- including
Afghanistan after 2014 -- internal turmoil may well have external consequences
requiring some response from Washington. Effective local institutions do
contribute to stability and growth, and the United States should do what it can
to nurture them where possible. The difference is likely to be in the priority
Washington accords such efforts. The January 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance,
for example, reflected the judgment that “U.S. forces will no longer be sized
to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations” and announced an
intention to pursue “innovative, low-cost, and small-footprint approaches” to
achieving objectives. Recently, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Admiral James “Sandy” Winnefeld, went even further: “I simply don’t know where
the security interests of our nation are threatened enough to cause us to lead
a future major, extended COIN campaign.”
In the future,
the United States is likely to rely less on power projection and more on
domestic preparedness, replacing an urgent civilizing zeal with defensive
self-protection. This makes sense, because the most appropriate answer to the
dangers inherent in an era of interdependence and turbulence is domestic
resilience: hardened and redundant networks of information and energy, an
emphasis on local or regional self-sufficiency to reduce the cascading effects
of systemic shocks, improved domestic emergency-response and cybersecurity capacities,
sufficient investments in pandemic response, and so forth. Equally important is
a resilient mindset, one that treats perturbations as inevitable rather than
calamitous and resists the urge to overreact. In this sense, the global
reaction to the recent surge in piracy -- partly a product of poor governance
in African states -- should be taken as a model: no state-building missions,
but arming and protecting the ships at risk.
When it does
reach out into the world to deal with weak states, the United States should
rely on gradual progress through patient, long-term advisory and aid
relationships, based on such activities as direct economic assistance tailored
to local needs; training, exchanges, and other human-capacity-development
programs; military-to-military ties; trade and investment policies; and more.
The watchwords should be patience, gradualism, and tailored responses:
enhancing effective governance through a variety of models attuned to local
patterns and needs, in advisory and supportive ways.
As weak states
continue to generate specific threats, such as terrorism, the United States has
a range of more limited tools available to mitigate them. It can, for example,
return terrorism to its proper place as a law enforcement task and continue to
work closely with foreign law enforcement agencies. It can help train and
develop such agencies, as well as local militaries, to lead in the fight. When
necessary, it can employ targeted coercive instruments -- classic intelligence
work and clandestine operations, raids by special operations forces, and, with
far greater selectivity than today, remote strikes -- to deal with particular
threats, ideally in concert with the militaries of local allies.
Some will
contend that U.S. officials can never rule out expeditionary state building
because events may force it back onto the agenda. If al Qaeda were to launch an
attack that was planned in restored Taliban strongholds in a post-2014
Afghanistan, or if a fragmentation and radicalization of Pakistani society were
to place nuclear control at risk, some would recommend a return to
interventionist state building. Yet after the United States’ recent
experiences, it is doubtful that such a call would resonate.
The idea of a
neo-imperial mission to strengthen weak states and stabilize chaotic societies
always flew in the face of more important U.S. global roles and real mechanisms
of social change. There is still work to be done in such contexts, but in more
prudent and discriminate ways. Moving on from the civilizing mission will, in
turn, make possible a more sustainable and effective national security
strategy, allowing the United States to return its full attention to the roles
and missions that mean far more to long-term peace and security. One of the
benefits of this change, ironically, will be to allow local institutional
development to proceed more organically and authentically, in its own ways and
at its own pace. Most of all, the new mindset will reflect a simple facing up
to reality after a decade of distraction.
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