"Military Intervention Never Works."
Wrong. The fixity of the failed-states rankings from year to year reminds us that the multiple diseases that plague these places are very resistant to being cured, whether by domestic actors or outsiders. Certainly the examples of Afghanistan and Haiti, the petri dishes of 2010, are not encouraging. But there are a few rays of light -- all of which, oddly enough, have involved military intervention. Liberia and Sierra Leone have been pulled back from the brink of utter chaos in recent years, and both are now at peace. The same may be true of Ivory Coast in future years; it's still too early to tell after this year's brief and bloody post-election civil war. Iraq, a country whose descent seemed to have no bottom five years ago, has improved its standing on the index as sectarian violence has diminished over the last year, from No. 7 to No. 9.
The inference to be drawn is not that the solution to failed states is to send in the Marines, but rather that, at moments of supreme crisis, outsiders can bend the trajectory of failed states by using force to topple monstrous leaders or prevent them from gaining power. But intervention is itself a sign of failure, a failure to anticipate the moment of crisis. Any new policy toward failed states needs to focus on prevention rather than reaction, not only to avoid the need for military force, but also because in many places intervention simply will not be possible. You want to know now that, say, Thailand is at risk of political crisis, because while neighboring countries and Western powers have diplomatic tools they can use to avert calamity, there may be little they can do once violence breaks out. The supreme example of the dire consequences of ignoring early warnings is, of course, Rwanda, where U.N. officials and the Security Council ignored repeated warnings of an impending genocide and reacted only when it was too late to stop the killing.
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