Nation-building doesn't always fail: David Andelman

Of course, that’s just what George W. Bush was saying a month before he won the presidency in 2000. Three years and two invasions later, Bush was singing a different tune as he recognized that “rebuilding Iraq will require a sustained commitment from many nations, including our own.”

We shouldn’t put too much of a rosy glow on all this nation-building, of course. The idea of supporting a nation until it reaches some form of sustainable democratic government has often proved to be a failure. But quite often, it has also proved to be the only viable way out of a crisis either of our own or others’ making, one that would otherwise lead to a vacuum and a failed state that’s a new home for an even more pernicious terrorist organization.

One of the key elements of nation-building that Trump and the early George W. Bush failed to understand is its very definition. James Dobbins of the RAND Corporation defines it to me as “the use of armed force, along with other instruments in the aftermath of a conflict, to bring about a transition to a durable peace and ideally a democratic system of government.” In that sense, the idea goes back to West Germany and Japan after World War II and South Korea after the Korean War. In each case, it eventually worked out pretty well — three stable, prosperous democracies that rose from the ashes of vicious conflicts.

Within this narrow definition, the United Nations (often with U.S. help) has at least 16 nation-building operations under way today. And the U.S. is involved in at least two more in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The biggest problem, which Trump has failed to identify, is that it is often all but impossible while you are in the midst of a conflict to build a strong, viable nation capable of holding forces of evil at bay.

“If you mix it with an ongoing war, then you really are overlapping very heavily with counterinsurgency rather than stabilization and reconstruction,” Dobbins says. There is also sometimes the more pressing and difficult issue of how to treat countries that have neither the institutions nor inclinations to sustain democracy, or that democratically elect leaders whom America might consider the wrong sort. 

That has been America’s main problem in Iraq. The Obama administration did order a pullout when our role in the fighting should have been over. But we didn’t leave behind the essential mechanisms to begin building a viable, peaceful and democratic state — which may include civilian and military forces, as Hillary Clinton and others were apparently urging, in vain, on the Obama White House.

The often horrific consequences of no nation-building are pretty clear. It’s what happened, for instance, when the United States helped drive Russia out of Afghanistan in 1989 then promptly pulled up stakes, leaving the whole steaming pile to fall into the hands of the Taliban and its allies in al-Qaeda. The consequences of that are pretty well-known — the 9/11 attacks hatched in al-Qaeda’s Afghan stronghold, and our return to Afghanistan where we remain today, trying desperately to find our way out yet again amid a continually failing state.

Moreover, to suggest blindly that all nation-building must end is to miss some of its most remarkable successes in the past four decades. A RAND study of 20 nation-building efforts that took place from 1988 to 2005 showed that in 2012, 16 of these nations remained at peace. All but two showed a positive change in Freedom House’s freedom index. All but three showed a per capita growth in gross domestic product that ranged from 8% to 213%.

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These states all fell within the narrow RAND definition of armed nation-building. But when you broaden the concept from propping up failing states after a conflict to encouraging the formation of democratic nations that make good neighbors and even allies, the results are more dramatic.

“Since the mid-1970s, there has been a very substantial increase in the number of democratic countries around the world, starting with 30 or 40 and going up to over 120,” Dobbins says. “We have had quite a significant role in much of it.” 

The most profound concern about Trump’s concept of nation-building is his apparent inability to grasp the endgame. “Military, cyber and financial warfare will all be essential in dismantling Islamic terrorism,” Trump says. But what then?

In the end, we must decide what we want to leave behind — toxic vacuums, or stable and secure nations capable of defending themselves against all enemies. Only then can we determine how we might arrive at the best result.

David A. Andelman, editor emeritus of World Policy Journal and member of the Board of Contributors of Paste BN, is the author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today, and with the Count de Marenches, The Fourth World War.  Follow him on Twitter @DavidAndelman.

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