Lines in the sand.

• Author: Delahunty, Robert
• Position: American foreign policy

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.

The policy of the United States has been to maintain, by force if necessary, nation-states within their pre-existing, "internationally recognized" borders: either "nation-building" (Afghanistan) or "nation-reconstruction" (Iraq). But even before September 11, state failure was a critical national security concern. The United States slowly came to grips with the collapse of states such as Yugoslavia and sought to restore some semblance of functioning order in others such as Haiti, Rwanda and even Somalia. Throughout, the United States has shown a bias in favor of maintaining the status quo that may stretch back to the administration of the first President Bush, if not before.

We have not only sought to restore or impose a nation-state framework in troubled areas. We have also sought to transplant the democratic model of the nation-state that the United States embodies: a model of democracy that tempers majority rule with substantial protections for minorities and with guarantees of individual rights, private property and markets. While President Bush sounds almost millennial in praising the blessings of democracy and individual liberty, there are more practical reasons for the policy: Our government spreads democracy because it believes that democracy enhances American national security and stabilizes the international system, thus reducing the need for the United States to intervene abroad. For the Bush Administration, it has been the democratic nation-state or nothing.

While our current foreign policy leaders have not fully explained the mechanism by which democracy promotes international peace, the link may exist for three reasons. First, some studies indicate that democracies do not go to war with each other--so the more democracies there are in the world, the fewer threats there will be to the United States. Second, democracy is believed to encourage a market economy, which generates prosperity and therefore less desire for foreign conflict. Third, democracies are thought to discourage violence in favor of peaceable methods of debate, negotiation and compromise. Democracies, it is assumed...