I know neo-colonial engineering is  exciting and challenging to the bloggers on this site, but having seen its horriffic failures, you can count me as one who doesn't think multilateralism and international cooperation (yes the UN), were bad routes toward international problems. Slaughter's problem with the disaster in Iraq was not the clear violations of international law by the US, or the opposition of most of the world, but that her group of neocolonialists were not the chosen group...so we have the whiny quibble..."we could have done better". I prefer different to better. Rejecting neocolonialism is not the same as isolationism (Slaughter tries to slip that one in at the end). Dean Slaughter, where is there evidence of rising isolationism? in the rejection of the Iraq war? Or are you referring to the neoconservative neocolonialists who want the US out of the UN so they can manage the world more effectively unilaterally? I would really appreciate seeing some evidence of rising isolationism? Please.

Remember, with the exception of a few countries, the U.S. is not particularly dependent on foreign nations. We could always end trade and/or economic aid. That would likely be far more destructive than a military operation.

Not Iglesias, as in Julio, but Yglesias, as in Matt

I would love to hear from others on this, but I believe the need to uphold and defend client-states in Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia and Western neocolonial domination of oil-rich Middle East was a primary cause for the FIRST  Gulf War and one of the underlying initial impetuses ("impeti" cannot be correct) for al Qaeda. (Of course, Israel is another. I do not mean to reduce the actions of the fanatics to a single simple cause).

I also have some ambivalence about the wisdom of an Office of Stabilization and Reconstruction, and my doubts are similar to those that others have already expressed.  Is the point of the office to come up with good ideas for repairing states that are failing on their own; or is its main task to put existing states back together after we, ourselves, have smashed them?  I fear it is the latter. And I would therefore have deep reservations about putting an effective tool of this kind into the hands of US government policy makers – especially since those policy makers have shown themselves to be very poor judges, as a group, of the conditions in other countries, and of the likely consequences of violent “reconstructive” action.  If the king’s men grow confident in their ability to glue broken states back together again, they will feel free to smash them with even greater abandon.

But I am even more concerned about the undue amount of attention that foreign policy thinkers continue to lavish on such projects, and upon the whole exaggerated problem of “failed states”.  Surely the lesson of the past few years is that the greatest security threats continue to come from conflict among regular states – stable, strong states that are not at all “failing”.  And even where failed states do pose a security problem, the precise nature of that problem is frequently misrepresented.

States are large, corporate enterprises with interests that sometimes align, but just as often conflict, placing those states in a condition of competition.  Because competition in the realm of states takes place on a very weakly regulated playing field, that competition is prone to follow a violent and lawless course. It is more like the competition that occurs among organized crime families, syndicates and cartels, rather than the regulated competition that occurs among companies that operate inside powerful states under a state-imposed rule of law.  Many of the most powerful states in the contemporary world, it must also be noted, possess nuclear weapons and other forms of great destructive power.  So when they reach for the violent tools of statecraft, they are likely to bring pain and devastation to millions of innocent people.

The system that checked and rationalized state power for years – a bipolar system in which two well-organized and internally regulated blocs competed with each other - has disappeared, and has been replaced with a much less predictable and much less orderly multipolar system.  The bipolar system was, to be sure, no monument to human rationality and sanity – it kept us perilously close to nuclear annihilation for years.  But the emerging multipolar system threatens to be even worse. And while the UN system that many of us hoped would step into the power vacuum created by the collapse of the bipolar system has helped a great deal in the case of smaller, regional conflicts among weak states, it is so far failing miserably to address the problems posed by great power conflict.

Adding to the danger is a global economy in which states compete with growing vigor for essential natural resources that are increasingly scarce and expensive, though they are no less vital than ever to prosperity and national survival.  These states also exist in a globalized natural environment in which environmental conditions inside states depend more than ever on the behavior of other states, and in which all states will feel a growing incentive to interfere in the internal affairs of other states.

The main problem posed by failed states under these conditions is that the failed states often occupy territory that is economically attractive for various reasons, and they thus pose appealing targets for opportunistic predation by larger states, and risk becoming the setting for conflict and war among great powers.  Since no state is a charity operation, we can safely predict that any state that operates a “reconstruction and stabilization” apparatus will use that apparatus as a tool in the competitive struggle for national advantage.  The chief agencies for humanitarian intervention, reconstruction and their ilk must reside in broad-based, transnational institutions, because that is the only hope we have of insulating these activities from their corrupt employment in the service of vested national, corporate or individual interests.

The emphasis on rebuilding international institutions should be what distinguishes progressives from realists.  The progressive – as opposed to the classical realist - sees in history the permanent potential for the growth and expansion of government, in the most general sense, by deliberate human action and rational choice.  Realists typically see international relations as an arena of more-or-less permanent anarchic flux, an eternal cycle in which some powers rise and others fall, but in which things only rarely get better from the point of view of human governance and organization – and when they do get better they don’t stay that way for very long.  The best that can be done, from the realist perspective, is to manage the dynamic change by power balancing, so that the rotations of place among the powerful are not too catastrophic.   Progressives hope for something better – the careful building-up of something that over time approaches genuine global government.

A new international institutional order must be truly broad-based.  The Alliance of Democracies notion that has been floated by Mr. Ikenberry and others is too parochial.  It seems designed more as a motor for risky, revolutionary change rather than as a means for establishing the peace and security which are the preconditions for sure, evolutionary progress.  It is also appears to be aimed at giving certain, select countries more freedom of action, and greater capacity for violent intervention.  Frankly, that seems to be the very last thing we need in the contemporary world.  It would be better to have a situation in which the great powers, those with the capacity to do the most damage, are so embroiled in overlapping systems of interdependency and mutual obligations that their freedom of action is tightly constrained.  What we need now are greater checks on state power, not a new liberation of state power in the form of an ideologically-oriented alliance.

What seems so dangerous to me about our current situation is that so many people have come to see state-to-state relations as the easy, comfortable, manageable problems, while viewing failed states and stateless terrorist organizations as the real perils.  This just seems backward to me.  There is endless talk these days about preventing one lone terrorist from setting off a single nuclear weapon or dirty bomb or chemical attack, while there are whole countries out there with arsenals of nuclear weapons.  And the risk of a catastrophic degeneration of the international situation in a very short period of time is a very real one - as history has shown on a number of occasions.  As the competitive struggle for resources grows more pitched, and opportunistic alliances are made and broken with increasing rapidity in the economic hustle, countries that are now “our friends”, with whom war currently seems unthinkable, could rather quickly become enemies.

While we talk about how to handle failed states, very few of which pose really substantial security problems for us, the world of regular states is heading toward a cliff, poised to embark on a century of ghastly resource wars that may very well rival the nightmares of the 20th century.  What is our plan for preventing this?