USAID Should Become the Department of Nation-Building by Max Boot and Michael Miklaucic, Foreign Policy

Nation-building abroad has become a neuralgic term in American politics ever since it became associated with the lengthy and costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Opposition to it is one of the few things that Barack Obama and Donald Trump can agree on. Both believe that “nation-building begins at home,” as the president so often says.

And yet, at the same time that U.S. leaders proclaim their opposition to nation-building, they acknowledge that failing states pose a serious threat to American interests. As Obama said in his 2016 State of the Union address, “Even without [the Islamic State] … instability will continue for decades in many parts of the world — in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan, in parts of Central America, in Africa, and Asia. Some of these places may become safe havens for new terrorist networks. Others will just fall victim to ethnic conflict, or famine, feeding the next wave of refugees. The world will look to us to help solve these problems.”

But the United States cannot adequately respond to global instability with military force alone. The U.S. public will not support more large-scale interventions like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, absent a compelling casus belli, while lesser military measures — such as drone strikes and Special Operations raids — are unlikely to prove adequate to safeguard American security. Although “kinetic” strikes can kill terrorist leaders, such as the Taliban’s Mullah Mansour or al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden, they can seldom eliminate entrenched terrorist organizations — and they can never create indigenous institutions capable of maintaining law and order on their own…

Read on.