"The United States Needs a Failed-States Policy."
Maybe not. One of the standing critiques of the Obama administration's foreign policy is that, though the president has spoken frequently of the danger posed by state failure, he has never formulated a coherent policy to prevent or cure it. The administration has been sensitive on this score; during her recent tenure as head of policy planning at the State Department, Anne-Marie Slaughter suggested that the U.S. civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan could be viewed as a "petri dish" for such a policy and that the post-earthquake state-building effort in Haiti, with its high level of collaboration with international partners, could serve as an alternative model. But today, even advocates of the administration's large-scale effort in Afghanistan acknowledge that the attempt to spread good governance there has largely failed, while even a year after the Haiti quake the state-building effort there has barely even begun.
Perhaps the problem lies with our habit of thinking of failed states monolithically. What can it mean to have a policy that covers both Haiti and Afghanistan? What template could dictate a useful set of choices for U.S. officials in both Yemen, where state failure poses a direct threat to U.S. interests, and the Central African Republic, which has no strategic significance? And what policy would supply any useful options at all for Somalia, a wasteland that appears to be impervious to all forms of outside meddling, benevolent or malign? In this case, policy coherence may be overrated.
The Obama administration is certainly seeking such coherence. The State Department's Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, a novel effort to marshal the tools of "soft power," repeated the criticism about the absence of an overarching policy, but also placed a welcome emphasis on the need to develop civilian capacity to actually do whatever it is policymakers decide needs to be done. At present, meaningful U.S. policy options are undermined by the absence, at least outside the armed forces, of operational or "expeditionary" capacity: police trainers, sanitation experts, public-health officials, forensic accountants, and lawyers (yes, lawyers) who can be deployed to fragile states or post-conflict settings. You need people to do things. Unfortunately, congressional Republicans seem determined to gut any and all increases in nonmilitary capacity. Conservatives seem more comfortable with old-fashioned threats from powerful countries like China, Iran, and Russia. Perhaps they're not troubled by the absence of a failed-states strategy because they don't worry about failed states.
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