Good ideas

State-building, the function American presidents love to hate, is the unavoidable foreign policy burden of our times. Without it, the war against the Islamic State and other extremists will last forever. Only when Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Egypt are better governed will they be immune to the extremist infection that has roiled the Middle East.

Fortunately, I’ve got colleagues around DC who not only agree with this proposition but also are thinking hard what to do about it. I prefer not to spend my time and whatever intellectual energies I’ve got left thinking about reforming the US government, which has resisted most such efforts for well over 200 years. But I’m glad others are willing to engage.

Max Boot and Mike Mikclaucic want to reconfigure the US Agency for International Development into a state building agency, giving up most of its programs to international governmental and nongovernmental organizations better suited to the tasks and often better funded. They would toss out “poverty alleviation, global health, biodiversity, women’s empowerment, education, sanitation, and economic and agriculture development.” They want the US agency to focus on ungoverned or inadequately governed spaces, seeking to provide them with security forces, courts, professional civil services, and accountable financial mechanisms. In other words: the essential functions of sovereignty.

They also want AID–or maybe it would be called the US Agency for State Building–to focus on fewer countries, mainly but not exclusively in what some of us think of as the Greater Middle East (Morocco to Pakistan, more or less), plus countries at risk from Russian and Chinese expansionism, with a few Latin American countries thrown in for counternarcotics purposes. The point is to choose them based on their strategic importance to US national security.

John Norris, arguing that our current practices favor rewarding failed states with lots of money and attention, takes what he terms a”better” approach to fragile states. He proposes that willing and able fragile states–not the utterly failed ones–be invited to enter into repeatable 5-year, USAID-administered Inclusion, Growth and Peace compacts, with the aim of developing effective and legitimate institutions over a decade and more. While not proposing a definitive list, he suggests:

Niger, Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Lebanon, Uganda, Myanmar, Cameroon, Egypt, Mali, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Timor-Leste, Nepal, and Rwanda all stand out as countries where a mixture of host country commitment, effective diplomacy, positive leverage, and sound assistance strategies could help move them more permanently out of the fragility category.

Adding Tunisia and Mali for good measure, Norris says the pay-off from focusing more attention on these not-yet-basket cases could be particularly high.

This approach is analogous to one the Millennium Challenge Corporation uses, usually for more consolidated states. Greater flexibility would be required for fragile states, and the money would be focused on improving legitimacy, which is something the host country naturally wants. But it would have to make specific, transparent and accountable commitments in exchange.

Implicitly, the array of current AID objectives that Miclaucic and Boot cite would be at least partly dropped in Norris’ approach as well, though of course improvement in state effectiveness would likely result in some of those objectives being met. Norris proposes specific indicators for his compacts, geared toward the problems of fragile states like return of refugees and internally displaced people, reduction of grievances and increased government effectiveness, among others. He also proposes getting rid of the parallel budgets funded as Overseas Contingency Operations, but only if equivalent amounts are re-inserted into regular appropriations of State, AID and Defense.

That’s about as much budgetese as I am capable and willing to speak. The main point for all three authors is just this: our current foreign assistance is not producing the best results because it is focused on the wrong objectives and countries and because it is spent on the wrong efforts. The stove pipes that rule the foreign assistance world are separating things that belong together, especially where fragile states are concerned. We could do much better if we re-thought the whole package strategically, from ultimate objectives to programs.

As I explained in the book advertised to your upper right, I doubt that can be done with existing institutions, which have proven irremediable. But Norris, Boot and Miclaucic have put forward good ideas worthy of attention.