Op-ed by Gordon Adams & Richard Sokolsky in Lawfare on security assistance & governance

If there is one proposition over the past 25 years that has commanded a bipartisan and near-unanimous consensus among U.S. government officials, foreign policy wonks, and the commentariat, it is that failing and failed states can pose serious threats to U.S. national security. This challenge is identified as one of the top U.S. foreign policy priorities in every authoritative U.S. government national security document issued over this period-from the President’s U.S. National Security Strategy and the Department of State’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Reviews (QDDRs) to a slew of white papers from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy, and a stream of “interagency” papers on ungoverned spaces.

It is somewhat discouraging, given the number of trees cut down on this subject-not to mention the bandwidth it has consumed among U.S. government officials of both parties-that administrations have struggled to define an integrated strategy and effective set of tools to deal with the crisis of poor governance and resulting insecurity and conflict in large swaths of the Middle East and Africa.

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