“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.

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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.

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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.

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The latest foray into this misleading argument comes from Benjamin Powell at The Freeman. Powell starts with a lurking straw man:

…by most measures Somalia’s poverty is diminishing and Somalia has improved living standards faster than the average sub-Saharan African country since the early 1990s. In that sense Somalia is at least a relative success story. The most interesting part of Somalia’s success is that it has all been achieved while the country has lacked any effective central government.

Powell spends most of the rest of the article describing governance in Somalia (which, to his credit, is a very interesting discussion). But there is a straw man lurking in the paragraph above and its “central” to his argument. (Intentional double entendre.) When we get to the next-to-last paragraph, the straw man becomes vivid:

Somalia does demonstrate that a reasonable level of law and order can be provided by nonstate customary legal systems and that such systems are capable of providing some basis for economic development.

I don’t know if the straw man is intentional or if Powell doesn’t understand that he is contradicting himself. What makes these customary legal systems non-state? Somalia doesn’t look like a state in the modern, western-defined sovereign empirical sense, but this is only one type of state. If Somali clans have the legitimacy to provide security for the people they govern, then by definition these clans form a state. What is unclear here is if Powell doesn’t recognize the difference between a state in a theoretical sense versus the empirical way we define a state today or whether he is trying to mislead us. Confusion about the concept of a state is at the center of the (failed) argument. Once we realize that the empirical modern state is only one type of state that can exist, the argument really comes back to “why don’t you govern they ways outsiders want you to govern.” I hate to be all ethno-centric here, but this is the bare-bones argument, even if Powell doesn’t recognize it.

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Positive Consequences:

• Spread of Democracy. While the third wave of democracy began in the mid-1970s, the trend gained substantial momentum after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  According to Freedom House, since the end of the Cold War, the percent of not free countries in the world has dropped from 41% to 22%.  The European Union deserves particular praise for its efforts to ensure democratic transitions in Central and Eastern Europe.  More important than the change in the number of democracies is the general perception that democracy is the most legitimate form of government.

• Decline in War. Starting in the early 1960s, the number of armed conflicts began to rise from about twenty active per year, steadily rising to about 55 in 1993.  Since then, the number has dropped to about 35, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program.  Even more remarkable is the decline in the number of war deaths.  According to the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO), between 1950 and 1990, about 200,000 people per year died fighting wars.  Since the end of the Cold War, the number has plummeted to about 80,000.

• Reduction in Threat of Global Nuclear War. The Cold War was not a friendly rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union.  As hard as it is for us to remember, the greatest fear during the Cold War was global nuclear war.  When the Soviet Union put nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962, this possibility became all too real.  When the Cold War ended, the fear of global nuclear war did as well.       

Negative Consequences:

• Nuclear Proliferation. Since the end of the Cold War, efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons have faltered.  Today, two unstable regimes, North Korea and Pakistan, both have nuclear weapons, and Iran is attempting to develop them.  As the number of countries who have nuclear weapons rises, the possibility that one country will use them increases as does the possibility that non-state actors, primarily terrorist groups, will acquire them.

• Failed States. Failed states did not exist during the Cold War because the Soviet Union and the United States were prepared to prop up weak regimes in return for political alliances.  Since the end of the war, this exigency has subsided.  The result has been state collapse in a number of places, primarily Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and Somalia.  Failed states are not pleasant places.  Close to six million people have died in the DRC’s civil war, making it the deadliest conflict since World War II.  When Afghanistan fell into civil war after the Soviet Union left, the Taliban and its brutal form of justice emerged as the only force capable of providing security. While the cost of keeping these countries together during the Cold War may have been high, the cost of letting them fail seems far higher.

• 9/11. It would not be accurate to argue that terrorism was a consequence of the end of the Cold War (ask the British about the IRA).  It would also not be accurate to argue that fundamentalist Islamic movements were a consequence of the end of the Cold War either.  Rather, because the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and because the Mujahideen were the main force fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, fundamentalist Islamic movements were more a product of the Cold War than a consequence of it.  One can plausibly make the claim, however, that 9/11 was an unintended consequence of the end of the Cold War.  After the Soviet Union left Afghanistan and the US pulled its support as well, Afghanistan collapsed into civil war.  The Taliban emerged as the only force that was able to provide security and by the mid-1990s was governing large parts of the country.  It also allowed Al-Qaeda to use its territory for terrorist training camps.  Although we can never know for certain if 9/11 would have happened without Al-Qaeda using Afghanistan as a base of operations, that it was able to do so should give pause to those who think the country poses no threat to the US today.  I am not saying that if the US leaves Afghanistan Al-Qaeda will return.  In fact I do not believe this would happen.  Rather, my point is that we need to have some imagination when thinking about unintended consequences.

On balance, my belief is that things could have turned out much worse.  In the mid-1990s, many thought they would.  Wars in the Balkans, the Caucuses, and Central Asia led many to believe that the collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed frozen conflicts that would engulf the region in an endless series of bloody wars.  That has not happened.  Instead, democracy has spread (thanks in part to the EU’s admirable efforts in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe), wars have become less frequent, and the threat of nuclear annihilation does not exist.  True, terrorism, failed states, and nuclear proliferation are big problems, and Afghanistan in particular looks increasingly hopeless.  However, in my estimation things could have turned out far, far worse.  Perhaps there is hope for humanity after all.

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