Their authors cherry-pick anecdotal examples without causal analysis

It has become commonplace to claim that the gravest dangers to U.S. and world secu­rity are no longer military threats from rival great powers but rather cross-border threats emanating from the world’s most poorly governed, economically stagnant, and conflict-ridden countries. Public officials and the media—as well as many scholars—depict weak and failing states as generating or enabling a vast array of dangers, from transnational terrorism to weapons proliferation, organized crime, humanitarian catas­trophes, regional conflict, mass migration, pandemic disease, environmental degrada­tion, and energy insecurity. Leading thinkers like Francis Fukuyama argue, “Since the end of the Cold War, weak and failing states have arguably become the single-most important problem for international order.” Official Washington agrees. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has spoken of the “chaos that flows from failed states,” which serve as “breeding grounds, not only for the worst abuses of human beings, from mass murders to rapes to indifference toward disease and other terrible calamities, but they 1are [also] invitations to terrorists to find refuge amidst the chaos.” Likewise, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates predicts, “Over the next 20 years, the most persistent and potentially dangerous threats will come less from emerging ambitious states, than from failing ones that cannot meet the basic needs—much less the basic aspirations—of their people.” This new focus on weak and failing states represents a noteworthy shift in U.S. threat perceptions. During the 1990s, a handful of U.S. strategists began to call attention to the possible spillover consequences of weak governance in the developing world. Most U.S. policymakers, however, regarded states with sovereignty deficits almost exclusively through a humanitarian lens: such countries piqued the moral conscience but appeared to have little strategic significance. This calculus shifted following September 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda attacked the United States from Afghanistan, one of the poorest and most wretched countries in the world. The assault quickly produced a consensus in U.S. policy circles that state fragility was both an incubator and vector of multiple transnational threats. President George W. Bush captured this new view in his National Security Strategy of 2002, declaring: “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones.” In the words of Richard Haass, the State Department’s director of policy planning, “The attacks of September 11, 2001, reminded us that weak states can threaten our security as much as strong ones, by providing breeding grounds for extremism and havens for criminals, drug traffickers, and terror­ists. Such lawlessness abroad can bring devastation here at home. One of our most pressing tasks is to prevent today’s troubled countries from becoming tomorrow’s failed states.” This new threat perception quickly became conventional wisdom among government officials, journalists, and independent analysts at home and abroad. Since 9/11, this preoccupation with spillovers from weak or failed states has driven a slew of U.S. policy pronouncements and institutional innovations spanning the realms of intelligence, diplomacy, development, defense, and even trade. In 2003, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) identifi ed some fifty lawless zones around the world that might be conducive to illicit activity, and began to devote new intelligence collection assets to long-neglected parts of the world. The following year, Secretary of State Colin Powell established an Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization in the State Department, which worked with the National Intelligence Council to identify states at risk of collapse where the United States could launch conflict prevention and mitiga­tion efforts. In 2006 the National Security Strategy cited “weak and impoverished states and ungoverned areas” as a critical threat to the United States, and Condoleezza Rice, Powell’s successor, announced a new “transformational diplomacy” initiative intended to help build and sustain democratic, well-governed states that respond to the needs of their people and conduct themselves responsibly in the international system. To advance this goal, Rice announced a sweeping plan to ensure that U.S. foreign assistance was more closely aligned with U.S. foreign policy priorities. USAID devised its own Fragile States Strategy, designed to bolster countries that otherwise might breed terror, crime, instability, or disease. The Bush administration even cast its campaign for regional trade liberalization as a means to prevent state failure and its negative externalities. These trends have continued into the Obama administration, informing the Presidential Policy Directive on Development issued in September 2010 and the first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), released three months later. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Secretary of State, has repeat­edly depicted fragile and dysfunctional states as growing threats to global security, prosperity, and justice—and endorsed increased investments in U.S. “civilian power” resources to address these challenges. Such initiatives have been mirrored across the Potomac. The Defense Department’s guiding strategy documents now emphasize military cooperation to strengthen the sovereign capacities of friendly governments in the developing world against the internal threats posed by insurgents, terrorists, and criminals. “State weakness and failure may be an increasing driver of conflict and situations that require a U.S. military response,” the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy declared in spring 2009. As the National Defense Strategy of June 2008 explains, “Ungoverned, under-governed, mis­governed, and contested areas offer fertile ground for such groups to exploit the gaps in governance capacity of local regimes to undermine local stability and regional secu­rity.” The Defense Department and its Combatant Commands—including a new Africa Command—are responding to this new mission by deploying assets to the world’s rugged remote regions, uncontrolled borders, and un-policed coastlines. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has emphasized that, “Where possible, U.S. strategy is to employ indirect approaches—primarily through building the capacity of partner governments and their security forces—to prevent festering problems from turning into crises that require costly and controversial direct military intervention.” The new conventional wisdom is not restricted to the United States. Other rich world governments have adopted analogous policy statements and have begun to adapt their defense, diplomatic, and development policies and instruments to help prevent state failure and respond to its aftermath—and to quarantine themselves from the presumed “spillover” effects of state weakness. The European Security Strategy iden­tifies the “alarming phenomenon” of state failure as one of the main threats to the European Union. In Great Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government pioneered a government-wide effort to help prevent failed states from generating pathologies like crime, terrorism, disease, uncontrolled migration, and energy insecurity. Blair’s suc­cessor, David Cameron, has since launched a new UK National Security Strategy that prioritizes attention and resources to “fragile, failing, and failed states” around the world. Canada, Australia, and others have issued similar policy statements. Likewise at the multilateral level, international organizations depict state failure as the Achilles’ heel of collective security. A unifying theme of UN reform proposals over the past decade has been the need for effective, sovereign states to contend with today’s global threats. As UN Secretary General Kofi Annan declared in a December 2004 speech, “Whether the threat is terror or AIDS, a threat to one is a threat to all. . . . Our defenses are only as strong as their weakest link.” In 2006, UN member states endorsed the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission to ensure that states emerging from confl ict do not collapse once again into failure. In parallel with these steps, the major donors of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have pursued a “Fragile States” initiative, in partnership with the World Bank’s Low Income Countries Under Stress (now Fragile and Conflict Affected States) program. The underlying motivation for all of these efforts, as former Congressman Lee Hamilton has noted, is that “our collective security depends on the security of the world’s most vulnerable places.” What is striking, in view of this flurry of official activity, is how little empirical analysis has been undertaken to document and explore the connection between state failure and transnational security threats.