The Foreign Service Journal, December 2004

State to carry out reconstruction training or to create the Response Readiness Corps or Reserve Corps as called for by the Lugar-Biden bill. Nation-Building as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy Does the United States really need another bureaucracy to carry out nation-building? After all, regime change and post-conflict nation-building have been instruments of U.S. foreign policy since the turn of the 20th century. The U.S. military occupation to stabilize post-World War II Japan and Germany and to restore more democratic political systems and U.S. financial and technical assistance for postwar Western European economic reconstruction through the Marshall Plan marked the beginning of the modern era of nation-building. In the subsequent wave of nation-building, the United States led in the practice of military intervention in Latin America (Panama, Guatemala and Grenada) and Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Laos and South Vietnam) and Central Asia and the Middle East (Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq) to overthrow unfriendly regimes and rebuild war- torn countries as democratic market economies. It is important to recall, however, that nation-building was pursued after the Second World War not only by the United States but by Western Euro- pean governments and by internation- al organizations, such as the World Bank and the United Nations. Non- governmental organizations also became important chan- nels of foreign assistance. During the Cold War, Washington often attempted to wrap its preference for mil- itary incursions in the cloak of U.N. peacekeeping opera- tions, allied coalitions, or the work of international develop- ment organizations. The post-9/11 military invasions and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq continue a long history of actions by the U.S. to forcibly replace threatening regimes in other countries. Yet many diplomats, most notably George F. Kennan, clearly saw the use of military power alone as insufficient, and indeed deleterious, for creating political regimes more favorable to American ideals. In his book American Diplomacy 1900-1950 , Kennan both fore- saw the need to follow any military intervention with nation- building assistance and forewarned of the difficulties. “We can remember that war — a matter of destruction, brutal- ization and sacrifice, of separation, domestic disintegration, and the weakening of the deeper fabrics of society — is a process which of itself can achieve no positive aim,” Kennan wrote. “Even military victory is only the prerequisite for some further and more positive achievement which it makes possible but by no means assures.” Certainly the U.S. track record suggests that past, ad-hoc responses have not been very effective in securing peace and rebuilding societies ravaged by war. Despite nearly 60 years of nation-building by the U.S. government in countries around the world, the American public may be unaware of how infrequently such interventions have succeeded. For example, the World Bank found in 2003 that countries emerging from war had a 50-percent chance of relapsing into conflict within five years. A study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 2003 reviewed 16 major U.S.-led nation-building efforts since the beginning of the 20th century and found that in only four countries — West Germany, Japan, Grenada and Panama — did democratic gover- nance continue for more than 10 years after unfriendly regimes were dis- placed. In Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Cambodia, and South Vietnam dicta- torships emerged quickly after U.S. forces left the country. Nor have international organiza- tions done much better. After a decade under United Nations supervi- sion, democracy in Cambodia is still only a hope; elections are riddled with corruption, violence and fraud. U.N. peacekeeping and nation-building operations in Somalia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone failed to achieve either goal, and in other countries they encountered complex con- straints that made even humanitarian relief difficult. Lessons of Experience Although experience with nation-building yields few hard-and-fast rules for doing it well, it does offer guidelines for more successful policies that will be useful if the new civilian coordinating office is created. First and foremost, the office must work closely with the military and the State Department, at least in the early stages, to create a secure environment for reconstruction. Experience in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Bosnia should teach nation-builders that unless they can quickly ensure security and a peaceful settlement of conflict, little progress can be made toward establishing a strong national government, repairing infrastructure and creating the foun- dation for economic growth. In the aftermath of the American invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, continuing guerilla warfare, terrorism, lawlessness and eth- D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 57 In August 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell created an Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS).