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Conflict Prevention

U.S. Foreign Policy on Weak States: Time to Look at the Facts

By experts and staff

Published
  • Stewart M. Patrick
    James H. Binger Senior Fellow in Global Governance and Director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program
People stand near their belongings at a bus station in Mogadishu (Shabele Media/ Courtesy Reuters).

My friend Joseph Siegle of the National Defense University recently published an interesting article about “Stabilizing Fragile States” in order to protect against their “grim dangers to the international community.” In this, he echoes U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s claim that we must prevent Libya from becoming a giant Somalia. U.S. foreign policy has been infused with these arguments since 9/11, when weak and failing states were catapulted from their place as humanitarian concerns on the foreign policy agenda to top national security concerns. Under the first Bush administration, yours truly worked on the policy planning staff at the U.S. State Department, considering strategies to combat this threat of failing states.

But the Internationalist just published a book that empirically analyzes the transnational threats emanating from weak and failing states—and concluded that our conventional wisdom is based on isolated anecdotes that don’t accurately reflect the danger of all failing states. I was interviewed by Eric Felten on Voice of America’s On the Line about this recent book, Weak Links: Fragile States, Global Threats, and International Security:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeiD9GDyQws

Some highlights from the discussion: