CIAO DATE: 09/07
The National Interest
Lines in the Sand
Robert Delahunty and John Yoo
Abstract
We owe to Rousseau the insight that if there were no nation-states there would be no wars, and to Hobbes the insight that without nation-states there would be no domestic order. Foreign policy choices often involve judgments about the lesser of these two evils. Over the next several years, the United States must decide whether its interests are better served by trying to preserve threatened nation-states or by dismantling them—not least in the case of Iraq.
Many welcome the decline of the nation-state, urging reliance on international institutions and networks—both public and private—to create a more peaceful world instead. Solutions to international challenges will come from the United Nations and the European Union first, and nations second. But as the nation-state declines, transnational terrorist networks rise; as nationalism recedes, tribalism and violent religious extremism take its place. Failed or dysfunctional states have become breeding grounds for civil wars, genocide and other atrocities, terrorism, famine and the spread of lethal diseases. Spillovers can profoundly impact the developed world.
Since September 11, failed or dysfunctional states have become the central challenge to American foreign policy and national security—a point rightly noted in these pages last year by former National Security Advisors Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger. [1] Had Afghanistan not been a failed state, its government might not have harbored Al-Qaeda. Had Iraq not been governed by a tyrannical clique of warlords, it might not have posed a threat to its neighbors and its own people.