Ignoring the Real Foreign Threats

Just because the candidates haven't been debating a larger strategy for handling weak states doesn't mean they're not thinking about it. Clinton has several experts on failed states advising her, including Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the end of the Balkan wars, and Madeleine Albright, who made expanding democracy the theoretical aim of her tenure as Bill Clinton's Secretary of State. McCain's director of foreign and national security policy is Randy Scheunemann, from the conservative Project for a New American Century, who as a Senate adviser handled issues of military intervention in the Balkans and Somalia. And one of Obama's top campaign advisors, Susan Rice, has in the course of her work at the Brookings Institution produced, with Stewart Patrick of the Center for Global Development, a 50-page index of weak states that ranks 141 developing countries according to 20 factors such incidence of coups, GDP growth and primary school completion. The idea is to define state weakness in a way that identifies problem countries, and shows which areas in them need the most attention.

None of the candidates has said what concrete steps they would take to reorient the tools of American power to better handle the threats produced by weak states. And it's not clear how much of the strategic lesson has seeped up to the candidates from the advisors who know something about it. But for all the talk of the experience required to be Commander in Chief in the post-9/11 era, it might be useful to start asking.