Nor do failed states pose the greatest threats of pandemic disease. Over the past decade, outbreaks of SARS, avian influenza and swine flu have raised the specter that fast-moving pandemics could kill tens of millions worldwide. Failed states, in this regard, might seem easy incubators of deadly viruses. In fact, recent fast-onset pandemics have bypassed most failed states, which are relatively isolated from the global trade and transportation links needed to spread disease rapidly.
Certainly, the world’s weakest states — particularly in sub-Saharan Africa — suffer disproportionately from disease, with infection rates higher than in the rest of the world. But their principal health challenges are endemic diseases with local effects, such as malaria, measles and tuberculosis. While U.S. national security officials and Hollywood screenwriters obsess over the gruesome Ebola and Marburg viruses, outbreaks of these hemorrhagic fevers are rare and self-contained.
I do not counsel complacency. The world’s richest nations have a moral obligation to bolster health systems in Africa, as the Obama administration is doing through its Global Health Initiative. And they have a duty to ameliorate the challenges posed by HIV/AIDS, which continues to ravage many of the world’s weakest states. But poor performance by developing countries in preventing, detecting and responding to infectious disease is often shaped less by budgetary and infrastructure constraints than by conscious decisions by unaccountable or unresponsive regimes. Such deliberate inaction has occurred not only in the world’s weakest states but also in stronger developing countries, even in promising democracies. The list is long. It includes Nigeria’s feckless response to a 2003-05 polio epidemic, China’s lack of candor about the 2003 SARS outbreak, Indonesia’s obstructionist attitude to addressing bird flu in 2008 and South Africa’s denial for many years about the causes of HIV/AIDS.
Unfortunately, misperceptions about the dangers of failed states have transformed budgets and bureaucracies. U.S. intelligence agencies are mapping the world’s “ungoverned spaces.” The Pentagon has turned its regional Combatant Commands into platforms to head off state failure and address its spillover effects. The new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review completed by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development depicts fragile and conflict-riddled states as epicenters of terrorism, proliferation, crime and disease.
Yet such preoccupations reflect more hype than analysis. U.S. national security officials would be better served — and would serve all of us better — if they turned their strategic lens toward stronger developing countries, from which transnational threats are more likely to emanate.
Stewart Patrick is a senior fellow and director of the program on international institutions and global governance at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of “Weak Links: Fragile States, Global Threats, and International Security.”
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