The consequences of state collapse anywhere in the world can be devastating and destabilizing for neighboring and even distant countries.

The complexity of each situation demands a tailored response, according to Stanford scholars embarking on a new American Academy Arts & Sciences project to identify the best policy responses to failing states embroiled in civil wars.

A failed state is that whose political or economic system has become so weak that the government is no longer in control. Such instability has already threatened or affected Syria, Libya, Yemen and other polities.

The project, Civil Wars, Violence and International Responses, is led by Stanford’s Karl Eikenberry and Stephen Krasner. Eikenberry is a faculty affiliate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Krasner is a faculty member in the political science department and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Relations and Hoover Institution.

Other Stanford scholars involved include Francis Fukuyama and Steve Stedman of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law; CISAC's Martha Crenshaw, political scientist James Fearon; Paul Wise of the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research; and Michele Barry, the senior associate dean for global health at the medical school.

The effort will culminate in a two-volume issue in AAAS’s journal Dædalus. On Nov. 2-4, the academy will hold an authors’ workshop in Cambridge, Mass., to discuss journal content.

Different approaches

In an interview, Eikenberry said the problematic U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan make it clear that different approaches must be used for different countries.

“The robust counterinsurgency campaign that the U.S. employed for periods of time in both Afghanistan and Iraq was premised on the viability of the standard development model that aims to put countries on the path to economic well-being and consolidated democracy,” he said.

However, such an approach assumes that decision makers in those states have the same objectives as the intervening states, which typically seek to improve the lives of people in those countries, said Eikenbery. Prior to serving as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 until 2011, Eikenberry had a 35-year career in the U.S. Army, retiring in 2009 with the rank of lieutenant general.

As Krasner points out, when intervention occurs, the hope is that improvements in one area – such as the quality of elections, rule of law, economic growth, or military recognition of civilian authority – would lead to improvements in other areas, according to Eikenberry.

But opposition and a constrained sense of “limited opportunities” can arise to thwart a well-meaning intervention, Eikenberry said.

He added, “Information asymmetries and the absence of mutually compatible interests between national and external elites, make it impossible to put target countries on a rapid path to prosperity and consolidated democracy. External actors must have much more modest goals.”

Syrian consequences

As for the case of Syria, Eikenberry noted that such civil wars can actually become more lethal and dangerous to global order than inter-state conflicts.

These types of conflicts like that in Syria tend to escalate into high levels of violence because of the costs that the losing parties believe they will incur, he said.

“This in turn leads to state fragmentation and the possibility of transnational groups with international ambitions getting involved,” he said. “Civil wars can result in an enormous number of civilian casualties, which generates large scale refugee flows” and puts huge pressure on neighboring states.

Eikenberry said Syria is being “internationalized by entangling regional and great powers in proxy wars,” which is exacerbating that conflict beyond Syria and throughout the greater Middle East. As for the immediate, direct threat to the U.S., that debate still continues, he added. 

On that note, one project goal is to assess risks to other countries that may emanate from civil wars and protracted intrastate violence like that in Syria, Eikenberry said. He and his colleagues will examine the effects of  international terrorism, massive displacements of people, proxy wars that escalate to interstate warfare, criminal organizations that displace governments, and pandemics. 

Policy implications

Eikenberry is hopeful the project influences policy and practice toward countries experiencing civil war and violence.

“Facilitating dialogue among a variety of constituencies with knowledge on the dynamics and impact of civil wars that might not normally or directly interact, including government and military officials, human rights organizations, academic and scholarly experts, and the media, will be one outcome of the project,” he said.

The idea is to allow “new ideas to emerge” regarding how to handle such states, as well as methods of applying such findings, he said.

“Exploring ways to create stability and more lasting peace, taking into consideration voices from academic and practical fields, should prove valuable to the policy community,” Eikenberry said.

Following publication of the volumes, the project will convene international workshops aimed at developing better regional perspectives. Such outreach activities will provide the feedback for the publication of another AAAS paper aimed at informing U.S. and international policy and research on the subject. A series of roundtable discussions in Washington is also planned.

CISAC's William J. Perry created a free, public 10-week course for people to learn more about the looming dangers of nuclear catastrophe. His new MOOC, developed with the support of Stanford’s Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, offers a chance to take that message to a much larger audience.

Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday and Today is an online course (a "MOOC") taught by former Defense Secretary William J. Perry and a team of international experts. 

“I believe that the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe is greater today than it was during the cold war,” said Perry, who recently wrote a New York Times op-ed on why America should dismantle its ICBM missile systems.

Because the continued risk of nuclear catastrophe isn’t widely recognized, Perry believes, “our nuclear policies don’t reflect the danger. So I’ve set off on a mission to educate people on how serious the problem is. Only then can we develop the policies that are appropriate for the danger we face.” 

The course offers participants the chance to ask questions and participate in discussions via an online forum, which Perry and his fellow experts will address during weekly video chats. Each week, Perry will be joined in conversation by top thinkers, including CISAC's Martha Crenshaw, David Holloway and Siegfried Hecker, Scott D. Sagan, and Philip Taubman. George Shultz, the former secretary of state, will also participate. Outside experts include Ploughshares Fund president Joseph Cirincione, nuclear negotiator James Goodby, former Russian Deputy Minister of Defense Andre Kokoshin, and Joseph Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Learn more about "Living at the Nuclear Brink" in this story or watch a video. Register for the course here. It is now open for enrollment and begins Oct. 4.  

The CISAC lecture series, "Security Matters," surveyed the most pressing security issues facing the world today. Topics include cybersecurity, nuclear proliferation, insurgency and intervention, terrorism, biosecurity, lessons learned from the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis – as well as the future of U.S. leadership in the world.

The lectures come almost entirely from the 2014 winter term of International Security (PS114S), co-taught by intelligence expert and CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart and terrorism authority Martha Crenshaw co-taught the Security Matters class in 2015. (Zegart recently co-wrote a journal paper on why the U.S. might adjust its national security approach in light of a changing international order.)

“This series is the first in what we hope will be a continuing experiment of new modes and methods to enhance our education mission,” said Zegart. “We have two goals in mind: The first is to expand CISAC's reach in educating the world about international security issues. The second is to innovate inside our Stanford classrooms.”

Martin Hellman is not your average cryptography pioneer.

Hellman, who is known for his invention of public key cryptography (along with Whitfield Duffie and Ralph Merkle), has a life’s journey to share in story form, one that weaves together the most complex global flashpoints of our age with the deeply personal of any age. He and his wife’s new book, A New Map for Relationships: Creating True Love at Home and Peace on the Planet, spans far and wide, covering nuclear risks in North Korea, Iran, and America’s Middle Eastern wars.

But that is not all. He and his wife Dorothie Hellman open up about their marital struggles to show how they eventually reached a point of harmony and true love for each other. As Martin Hellman sees it, conflict in the international and interpersonal arenas has much in common.

“You can’t separate nuclear war from conventional war and conventional war from personal war,” he said in an interview. Hellman is a professor emeritus of electrical engineering and faculty affiliate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.  

Just as he and Dorothie (self-acknowledged polar opposites) often butted heads during the first 10 or 15 years of marriage, nations too navigate dangerously outmoded “maps” to protect their national security and interests. Yet these “maps” are soon outdated, whether on the global stage or in the home. Hellman said, however, that differences of opinion, which revolve around fights to prove who is “right,” could instead be transformed into opportunities to learn from one another – and to expand peace in the world.

“You have to believe in the seemingly impossible gifts of unconditional love and greater peace in the world, and then dedicate yourself to discovering how to achieve them,” he said.

Cultivating inner, outer peace

He said that society only truly changes based on individual changes, so he calls for action in how people live their everyday lives. When countries fail to respect each other – and ignore the influence of history on those countries – then conflict is more likely, and it is similar to a person disrespecting another.

“You will see an immediate payoff as your relationships flower,” he wrote in the book. “The small impact that each of us can have on changing the world does not feel concrete enough to most people, but seeing progress in your personal relationships is very concrete.”

That dedication to unconditional love, he said, is the way that individuals can become models for what is needed globally.

And the time is now, he suggests, for such change if our living generations are to leave a more peaceful world for those who follow us. From Afghanistan to Cuba, Russia, Iraq to North Korea and beyond, the countries of the world need a journey of healing and reconciliation, as he writes in the book.

Today, the stakes could not be higher, Hellman noted. Long-running strategies like nuclear deterrence are risky and illogical – over time, given probability theory and the chances of mistake or malice, they won’t work.

“The United States thinks it’s a superpower, but how can we be when Russia or China could destroy us in less than a hour?” he said. “How is that being a superpower?”

As William J. Perry, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Stanford professor emeritus at CISAC, said on behalf of the Hellmans’ book, “The struggle for interpersonal dominance can lead to the end of a marriage, but the struggle for geopolitical dominance can lead to the end of civilization.”

The international order is unraveling, according to a Stanford scholar. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has generally served as the top leader in this world order. But now the power equation is shifting, and the U.S. may see more countries challenging global rules and norms.

Three key factors threaten the distribution of power and authority among nations, said political scientist Amy Zegart, co-director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. But, she said, America can take a “pragmatic” approach to protecting its national interests.

The rise of China, more dangerous non-state actors than ever before and the weakening of international institutions are converging to create greater global instability, Zegart said.

Zegart co-wrote a journal article with Stanford political scientist Stephen Krasner about the benefits of a “pragmatic engagement” approach for the U.S. They also co-chaired a Hoover Institution working group on foreign policy and grand strategy to examine these issues.

If China continues to grow economically at its current rate, it will displace the U.S. as the country with the most material resources in the world, a position the latter has held for more than a century, Zegart said. Such a scenario comes with risks.

“It would mark the first time a great power would be a developing nation,” she said. “This has profound implications for the international order.”

For example, will China become a responsible stakeholder within the existing rules of the global order, Zegart said, or will it challenge that order?

“The record so far is decidedly mixed,” she said, noting that even if China wants to uphold the international economic and political order, it’s not clear that it can, based on its domestic political situation.

Challenges to power

On terrorism, technology has given weak states, non-state actors and even lone individuals the ability to wage cyberattacks, biological attacks and – potentially – nuclear attacks, according to Zegart.

“In this world, uncertainty abounds,” she said. In such an environment, people and even nations tend to retreat and not engage outside their spheres. “That’s part of the reason why in a recent survey, more than half of all Americans said they felt less safe today than they did on 9/11.”

Finally, international institutions such as the United Nations Security Council, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union are “misaligned with power realities,” as Zegart describes it.

“Institutions freeze into place the power relationships that exist at the time of their creation. They struggle to adapt to change. We see this at the domestic level, too. The U.S. government is built around a 1947 national security architecture that has a hard time adapting to 21st-century challenges, from cyberthreats to homeland security,” she said.

In the short term, Zegart said, the world is likely to see more contests for influence and more actors challenging what the United States will do. When the U.S. is not the guarantor of this order, the dynamic invites boundary testing.

“We see this with Iran’s missile testing, even after the Iran deal. We see it with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and hacking into the Democratic National Committee’s computers. We see it with China’s aggressive maneuvers in the South China Sea. We see it with North Korea’s escalation in the frequency of its nuclear and missile tests,” Zegart said.

Boundary testing is not healthy for international relations – it raises the odds of crisis escalation. “Meanwhile, leaders are so busy managing the crisis du jour that seeing emerging dangers becomes much more difficult,” Zegart said.

To address the challenges, U.S. national security policymakers should “return to the basics and ask what our objectives are in a more chaotic world and what strategies we think will best achieve them, and then deploy resources to meet those objectives,” Zegart said.

Guiding principles

The working group that she and Krasner co-chaired advocated three guiding principles for U.S. national security strategy.

“First, we have to be unapologetic about the pursuit of American economic and security interests, and more tempered in the pursuit of our ideals. We have always as a nation stood for universal freedoms but we have pursued those freedoms abroad in different ways, to different degrees, in different times as the external environment demanded and internal capabilities allowed,” she said.

Zegart said the U.S. should lead by democratic example, not democratic imposition.

“The most fruitful path toward spreading democracy is not toppling dictators without a clear path to a successor regime. It comes from bolstering civil society for internal transitions to democracy and demonstrating the benefits of democracy here at home,” she said.

Second, the U.S. can reform the international order by bolstering alliances and regional organizations, Zegart said. This includes Europe and the Asia Pacific region, and international institutions like the United Nations, World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

“We are advocating pragmatic international engagement, not isolationism,” she said.

Third, Zegart suggests that America can develop flexible unilateral capabilities that can be deployed against a wide array of increasing threats.

“The world is uncertain and our resources are limited. Smarter spending starts with developing more agile military capabilities and more robust non-military levers to advance our vital interests. We need Pentagon acquisition reform, moving from exorbitant, niche weapons systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and investing in low-cost unmanned systems and cyber capabilities,” she said.

Zegart noted that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is working hard to reform the way the Pentagon does business, but he faces resistance from entrenched interests.

As for the domestic and political impacts of a less stable world, Zegart said it is difficult to foresee all the consequences.

But she pointed to some disturbing indicators: growing chaos across the Middle East, rising nationalism in the U.S. and Europe, rising tensions in the Asia-Pacific region and domestic politics in many countries.

“I worry about rising political violence, erosion of trust in many institutions, not just political ones, and the backsliding of democracy, both in the United States and abroad,” she said.

Contact

Amy Zegart, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-4202, zegart@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu