I say, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing wrong
(UPDATE: go read Damir on this first)
Over at Shadow Gov’t, my friend Christian Brose has a pair of bracing posts on reshaping our foreign service to more accurately reflect today’s geopolitical realities. If you haven’t already, you should just go read them now, but broadly he recommends an approach that integrates our diplomatic corps with military and foreign aid personnel. The goal being to shift our resources away from state-to-state relations to state building, where necessary.
I have a few thoughts on this:
First, this reminds me a bit of the articles that Robert Kaplan has been tossing for some years now, particularly since 9/11. As I understand it, this is a kind of moderate, benevolent colonialism, whereby resourceful foreign service officers would have more autonomy on the ground to deal with situations in areas where low-level civil wars loom larger than cocktail parties.
Chris mentions how this parallels some of the debates over COIN. I was reminded of this Bacevich article, where he notes that the decision to jettison institutional knowledge on COIN was a strategic decision, not a tactical one: by removing that weapon from our arsenal, we would be less likely in the future to undertake COIN operations at all.
Now, politics is the art of the possible, and unlike me Chris has had actual policy experience; he understand the parameters within which decisions have to be made. If this is the way we’re headed, then rather than bitch about it, we might as well figure out how to do it right.
Yet I can’t help but feel that the more we get it right, the more we’ll involve ourselves in state-building. Moreover, we’re big guys. We can do this for a while. But maybe intermittent “failures” (like Iraq or Afghanistan), will prove less costly over the long run than constant “successes” all over the world.
I’m not sure I want us to be good at this stuff, anymore than I want my (future) kids to excel at World of Warcraft.
Two final thoughts:
1) (and I’m surely on the road to hell for this) As the late, great Charles Tilly noted, wars and general instability were crucial to the formation of European states. It is entirely possible that our state-building policies, however well-intentioned, have the effect of delaying that same process in the Third World.
2) Chris mentions Mexico. If there is any state in the world where state-building ought to concern us, I’d say it’s the one on our southern border. Of course, first we’d have to give Mexico, say, a tenth of the attention we pay to the Israel-Palestine conflict.