Even as a foolhardy, delinquent ninth grader in the Philippines, I vividly remember watching President George W. Bush’s groundbreaking ‘axis of evil’ speech in 2002. In that address, Bush famously asserted that Washington’s new post-9/11 security threat was the nexus between nefarious regimes and the vices of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism.
But today, I think America has much more to fear from an axis of failure than an axis of evil. Just listen to what the top policymakers and academics are saying. Last year, the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy emphasized the need to “build the capacity of fragile or vulnerable partners”. This February, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told Congress that he ranked the global economic crisis as Washington’s No. 1 security threat (above terrorism and proliferation). And this month, British historian Niall Ferguson writes in Foreign Policy that he sees an “axis of upheaval” emerging from the ashes of global economic calamity, just like it did during the tumultuous 1930s.
What gives? Well, the world financial meltdown has rendered Bush’s national security doctrine deficient. Today, we have to focus not only on noxious regimes but the toxic forces of economic and political discontent that can topple governments, trigger waves of instability or tire U.S. allies. National security is more about regime capacity than regime type. More about the weakness and desperation of states rather than their strength or hostility. More about failed states than bad guys.
Though definitional debates about failed states have persisted, the most detailed study on the subject is from a Brookings Institution report entitled “Index of State Weakness in the Developing World”. Using 20 indicators, the rigorous report concludes that there are 3 “failed states” (Somalia, Afghanistan and Congo) and 25 other “critically weak” states, including Iraq, Pakistan and North Korea. The havoc these states have wracked is staggering — Somali pirates hijacking ships, Afghanistan housing the Taliban, Congo’s civil war dragging in 9 other nations . . . the list goes on.
President Obama seems fully aware of the ‘axis of failure’ and the threat it poses to Washington. He has embraced the Millennium Development Goal of slashing extreme poverty and hunger in the world and backed this up by doubling foreign assistance. This, he eloquently notes, “will help the world’s weakest states build healthy and educated communities, reduce poverty, develop markets and generate wealth”. Intellectually, Obama’s longtime foreign policy adviser and current ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, was one of the co-authors of the Brookings report on failed states.
But dousing the flames of global instability will require more than just personnel shuffles and aid showers. Washington must draw on past lessons in order to paint a future strategy for the axis of failure. A few fundamentals are in order. First, don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good. Take Somalia. The United States supported a botched Ethiopian military intervention in 2006 to defeat Islamist militants in Mogadishu rather than empowering moderate Islamists. That policy was an unmitigated disaster. Washington must come to grips with reality: propping up failed states sometimes means working with the least bad forces in order to undermine the rise of more heinous ones.
Thwarting an axis of failure also requires more blood, sweat and tears. While the American electorate often grows weary of nation-building efforts fairly quickly, unfinished missions have a way of coming back to haunt Washington. Afghanistan is the poster child for this. The CIA successfully armed the Afghan mujahideen to victory against the USSR in the late 1970s but failed to rebuild the country. The resulting vacuum transformed Kabul into a cradle of Islamic fundamentalism under the Taliban, a shelter for Al-Qaeda and a breeding ground for 9/11. While nation-building may be costly in the short-term, it is often crucial to preserving long-term U.S. security. This should be ingrained in U.S. foreign policymakers minds as they think about Afghanistan and Iraq today.
Lastly, the variegated nature of failed states demands maximal flexibility and discrimination. Washington should be creative about using multilateral tools at its disposal, such as the UN Peace Building Commission which helps rebuild post-conflict states like Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast, or working with other powers like Britain, France and Germany to secure a solution. U.S. capacities should also be boosted, through efforts like President Bush’s Africa Command for the U.S. military, which will facilitate Washington’s future need for a military presence for combat, peacemaking or humanitarian reasons. Deciding which tools to use will hinge on the prudence of the President in determining the extent of threat, degree of international support and the capacity of American forces.
Of course, an axis of failure does not relegate concerns about proliferation or terrorism into the attic of Washington’s memory. But what it does do is to force the United States to adopt a more sophisticated view about the relationship between instability, governance and transnational threats instead of simply rooting out the hydra-headed beast of terrorism in whack-a-mole fashion. And the extent to which Washington grasps this new paradigm shift will determine its success in curbing this axis of failure.
Prashanth Parameswaran’s column appears Tuesday in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at p.parameswaran@cavalierdaily.com.
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