In the Obama administration, the fear endures. “In the decades to come, the most lethal threats to the United States’ safety and security — a city poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack — are likely to emanate from states that cannot adequately govern themselves or secure their own territory,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates explained last May. “Dealing with such fractured or failing states is . . . the main security challenge of our time.” And just last month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said military intervention in Libya was justified to prevent that country from becoming “a giant Somalia.”
The message is clear: Failed states are the weak link in the world’s collective security.
In truth, while failed states may be worthy of America’s attention on humanitarian and development grounds, most of them are irrelevant to U.S. national security. The risks they pose are mainly to their own inhabitants. Sweeping claims to the contrary are not only inaccurate but distracting and unhelpful, providing little guidance to policymakers seeking to prioritize scarce attention and resources.
In 2008, I collaborated with Brookings Institution senior fellow Susan E. Rice, now President Obama’s permanent representative to the United Nations, on an index of state weakness in developing countries. The study ranked all 141 developing nations on 20 indicators of state strength, such as the government’s ability to provide basic services. More recently, I’ve examined whether these rankings reveal anything about each nation’s role in major global threats: transnational terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, international crime and infectious disease.
The findings are startlingly clear. Only a handful of the world’s failed states pose security concerns to the United States. Far greater dangers emerge from stronger developing countries that may suffer from corruption and lack of government accountability but come nowhere near qualifying as failed states.
The link between failed states and transnational terrorism, for instance, is tenuous. Al-Qaeda franchises are concentrated in South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia but are markedly absent in most failed states, including in sub-Saharan Africa. Why? From a terrorist’s perspective, the notion of finding haven in a failed state is an oxymoron. Al-Qaeda discovered this in the 1990s when seeking a foothold in anarchic Somalia. In intercepted cables, operatives bemoaned the insuperable difficulties of working under chaos, given their need for security and for access to the global financial and communications infrastructure. Al-Qaeda has generally found it easier to maneuver in corrupt but functional states, such as Kenya, where sovereignty provides some protection from outside interdiction.
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