The Foreign Service Journal, November 2006

ates all aspects of strategic planning. Indeed, it has be- come practically an article of faith. Even the administra- tion’s October 2005 National Intelligence Strategy claims (without support) that “the lack of freedom in one state endangers the peace and freedom of others, and ... failed states are a refuge and breeding ground of extremism.” Failed States and Failed Reasoning In fact, the overwhelming majority of failed states have posed no security threat to the United States. The blan- ket characterization that failed states represent anything monolithic is misleading. The dangers that can arise from failed states are not the product of state failure itself; the threats are the result of other conditions, such as the pres- ence of terrorist cells or other malign actors within a failed state. It is not the “failure” that threatens. In 2000, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence sought to quantify and examine episodes of state failure. Adopting a loose definition of state failure, the authors found 114 cases between 1955 and 1998. A look at the list compiled by the CIA calls into question the methodology used. The report’s highly subjective stan- dard for state failure produced a data set that character- ized China, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Israel, the Philippines, Sierra Leone and Turkey as failed states as of December 1998. Surely it discredits any discussion of failed states if Israel and Sierra Leone fall under the same general heading. Other lists confirm that state failure in itself does not constitute a security threat. A list compiled by the British Department for International Development included such countries as Burundi, Cameroon, Comoros, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Indonesia, Kenya, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, São Tomé and Principe, Sierra Leone, the Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu. It is difficult to understand how many of the above coun- tries could present security threats to the United States in any foreseeable scenario. The Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine jointly published a “failed states index” recently that included some obvious cases such as Iraq and Afghanistan, but also prototypical failed states such as Cote d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, Chad and Guinea. Simply put, these states do not warrant significant attention from the U.S. national security apparatus. What would be more helpful, and more prudent, than issuing categorical statements about what failed states mean for the United States would be to examine coun- tries, failed or otherwise, on the basis of discrete measures of threat assessment: to what extent does a government — or nonstate actors operating within a state — intend and have the means to attack America? To the extent that any state does represent a threat, a massive nationbuilding mission targeted at the condition of state failure — rather than the threat itself — is not the most appropriate response. Attacking a threat rarely entails paving roads or establishing new judicial standards. Afghanistan serves as a stark reminder that we must not overlook failed states, but it does not justify moving “state failure” in the abstract to the top of the list of security con- cerns. An Unbounded Mandate Supporters of S/CRS believe that the advancement of political and economic reforms — in particular, the spread of democracy — constitutes part of its mandate. How- ever, that way of thinking carries with it serious risks: poorly executed or misguided nationbuilding operations might actually compound the problem of terrorism direct- ed against the United States. During the transition from autocracy to democracy, states are vulnerable to the col- lapse of civil order, widespread violence and counter-rev- olutionary coups. It is not only internal unrest that can follow in the wake of regime transformation. The risk of full-blown war actu- ally tends to increase in countries where political change has recently occurred. Professors Edward D. Mansfield of the University of Pennsylvania and Jack Snyder of Columbia University point out that new democracies typ- ically “go through a rocky transitional period, where democratic control over foreign policy is partial, where mass politics mixes in a volatile way with authoritarian elite politics, and where democratization suffers reversals. In this transitional phase of democratization, countries become more aggressive and war-prone, not less, and they do fight wars with democratic states.” Thus, if U.S. foreign policy seeks to minimize the risk of war, it may wish to eschew ambitious projects of “democratization,” or else be willing and able to occupy target countries indefinitely in the hope that a fully- formed democracy will eventually emerge. If nothing else, we should be confident that any intervention will produce outcomes beneficial to U.S. interests at an acceptable cost. Unfortunately, nationbuilding has an F O C U S N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 53