Graham vows to bring Senate to standstill for socialism

The fact that Lindsey Graham is willing to halt the work of the United State government just to get a pet project in his state is not surprising;  there are a number of Senators in both parties who feel the upper chamber was designed for hostage taking as a tool to enact bad policy (partially right).  The greatest part of this story, however, comes from Graham’s reasonable justification for the funding.

“I would say that putting the money into infrastructure that creates jobs is a good thing to do with taxpayer dollars,” he said. “No one has ever suggested that deepening the Port of Charleston would not be an economic benefit to the region and the nation as a whole.”

In other words, government spending can create jobs.

Failing to consider failing states in U.S. national security policy

For my inaugural post here on D&S, I’m going to blatantly promote the blog I helped design over at the Stimson Center. Stimson’s Budgeting for Foreign Affairs and Defense project has unveiled The Will and the Wallet, an analytical blog examining the institutions, processes, and issues that drive the U.S. budget for foreign affairs and defense.

To kick things off, we’ve got a guest post by Dr. Pauline H. Baker, President of the Fund For Peace. Dr. Baker explains why failed states are a matter of U.S. national security–and even though they rose in prominence in the eyes of foreign policy experts after September 11, this doesn’t really translate to a comparative dollar amount coming out of the U.S.’s foreign affairs wallet.

Failed states are unstable states. Instability grows like mold on a bad peach–and breeds geopolitical conflict, violence, and often warfare and terrorist training. This is why paying attention to failed states–particularly those that rank high on the Fund For Peace’s well-known Failed States Index–should be much more than a foreign policy afterthought. On the contrary, it ought to be on the forefront of national security policymaking and, as a result, budgeting and spending.

Check out Dr. Baker’s post on the W2 for her in-depth look at this issue.

Fight between State and NSC is over; DoD won

Josh Rogin posted a leaked draft of Presidential Study Directive 7 (PSD-7) on Foreign Policy yesterday. The NSC drafted the report and its subject is development policy in the Obama administration. The State Department is also working on this policy and will release it as the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR). This is part of a broader fight within the Obama administration between State and NSC over control of development policy.

The PSD-7 outlines a pretty good development policy. Obama might even implement it. In his third time. The problem here is that while State and NSC have been fighting over development policy, the Department of Defense has already made it. Don’t believe me? Check out this article by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Still don’t believe me? Well, consider this: according to the FY 2011 budget request the administration largely wants to channel foreign aid  to weak states, such as Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan (as well as the perennial favorites, Egypt and Israel), just like Gates outlined in his article. PSD-7, by contrast, places much less weight on weak states.

I have floated this hypothesis by a number of knowledgeable people in this area and they tend to agree that DoD is setting development policy while State and NSC are bickering. So here’s my recommendation to State and NSC. You can stop your sniping over development policy. The fight’s over. DoD won.

Failed argument

That “failed state” is a misleading term is a point that we have raised numerous times on this blog. Failed state does typically not mean anarchy, but failed modern sovereign state. To be cheeky, it means “why don’t you govern the way we [i.e., the developed world] want you to govern the boundaries we imposed on you without your consent?” To be cheeky and terse, it means “why don’t you govern the way the west wants you to govern?” Failed modern states often do provide security – hence making them a state in the theoretical sense – just in a different way than people with blue uniforms and badges. Their only failure is to live up to our expectations. Continue reading »

Lawless Places, Yemen Edition

Barak and I end up talking quite a bit about the misperception that states such as Somalia and Afghanistan are failed.  As Barak likes to point out, the problem isn’t that there is NO governance, but rather that it is not the Westphalian statehood model of governance we have all grown accustomed to in the US.  Here, now, almost as it was written just for us, is a blog post about similar ‘ungoverned’ areas of Yemen.  According to the authors, the correct term is ‘alternatively governed’, which I agree with, although it is close enough to late ’90s PC terminology to make me giggle.