Whither State? The Institutional Politics of American Nation-building Policy
This article discusses the difficulties associated with military-led stability and nationbuilding operations and argues that the United States’ current policy negatively affects defence capabilities, unduly influences how stability operations are prioritized and conducted, limits State Department capacities, and allows the military to be seen as the ‘face’ of American foreign policy. Several options exist for the United States to adequately address this issue to include the working within the established system, a reassignment of leadership responsibilities, or restraining the American tendency to intervene. The United States’ military has proven that it is capable of conducting nation-building operations, but at the cost of global misperception, painful inefficiency, significant risks to United States’ overall defence capabilities, and the issues of civilian control that follow from reliance on warriors in the role of diplomats.
Does Nation-Building Promote Liberty?
A typical protestor in the US may display a sign declaring “No blood for oil,” yet how many Americans would wave a banner proclaiming “No blood for liberty?” The promotion of liberty should come more into play in our evaluation of nation-building as a proper foreign policy strategy. For leaders, approaching nation-building from such a standpoint may eliminate unnecessary recourse to doomed strategies or unrealistic goals. Does nation-building promote liberty in the host nation, the intervening nation, both, or neither? The goal here is to address whether nation-building may possibly promote liberty and whether it has yet done so. Montesquieu and John Stuart Mill both exalted liberty as the highest form of human achievement, yet both also approved of colonization in some circumstances. The cases of US nation-building in Japan and Iraq are evaluated in light of these two theorists. The Japanese case demonstrates that the promotion of liberty within the “mother country” and the “dependent country” through nation-building is indeed possible. The case of Iraq, conversely, demonstrates that success and liberty are far from guaranteed.
To Devolve or Not To Devolve? Welfare Reform in the States
This article analyzes variation in the degree to which states have responded to the devolution of welfare at the federal level by devolving authority over welfare policy to local government. I find that to the extent that states have devolved authority to lower levels of government, they tend to be states that already had a high degree of involvement of local government in welfare provision. In states without this record of local government involvement, the devolution that has occurred has not generated greater involvement of local government, but rather responsibility has been devolved to regional entities with ties to workforce development and with a substantial degree of business involvement. As states gain increasing authority over a redistributive policy, they may begin to treat it as a subset of a larger developmental policy—workforce development.