Barack Obama, State Builder in Chief

A point that I see few people in foreign policy circles making is how much more ambitious Obama’s foreign policies are than George W. Bush’s were. Even if the Iraq war was about democracy (it wasn’t, it was about weapons of mass destruction, by the way), state building in Afghanistan is a far more difficult objective that democracy in Iraq. Although Iraq had a loathsome government, a state did exist, as did a military and a bureaucracy. The US was changing types of government in Iraq, not building a government. The latter is far more difficult than the former, but I see almost no one making this point. Moreover, according to Secretary Gates, state building – globally, not just in Afghanistan – is a central priority of the Obama administration. Writing in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs, for example, Gates states:

In the decades to come, the most lethal threats to the United States’ safety and security…are likely to emanate from states that cannot adequately govern themselves or secure their own territory. Dealing with such fractured or failing states is, in many ways, the main security challenge of our time…

The United States now recognizes that the security sectors of at-risk countries are really systems of systems tying together the military, the police, the justice system, and other governance and oversight mechanisms. As such, building a partner’s overall governance and security capacity is a shared responsibility across multiple agencies and departments of the U.S. national security apparatus

Why so few people see how ambitious (unrealistic?) this foreign policy is remains a true mystery to me.