Word: weak
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...however many states become involved in trying to defang Pyongyang and ease the North's eventual integration into the international system, it remains the case that for someone who has long been assumed to hold a weak hand, Kim has played his cards well. Using delay and deceit, always threatening, expressly or by implication, to deploy or sell his nukes, he has wheedled cash, fuel and food aid from the outside and used them to prop up his rule. Nothing, as I say, lasts forever. But the unification that Lee maintains is the "long-cherished desire of the 70 million...
...Just because the candidates haven't been debating a larger strategy for handling weak states doesn't mean they're not thinking about it. Clinton has several experts on failed states advising her, including Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the end of the Balkan wars, and Madeleine Albright, who made expanding democracy the theoretical aim of her tenure as Bill Clinton's Secretary of State. McCain's director of foreign and national security policy is Randy Scheunemann, from the conservative Project for a New American Century, who as a Senate adviser handled issues of military intervention in the Balkans and Somalia...
...tumult over Barack Obama's fairly mainstream assertion that he would strike "high-value" terror targets in Pakistan if the leadership there could not. The confusion over when and whether to intervene across sovereign borders shows how little light has been shed on America's policy for responding to weak-state threats during the campaign...
...Which is not to say that the candidates shouldn't debate Iraq and Pakistan policy - both are key issues. But America's foreign and national security policy megalith is still structured to handle superpower threats like the Soviet Union. What questions would a debate about weak-state strategy involve? A few suggestions...
...None of the candidates has said what concrete steps they would take to reorient the tools of American power to better handle the threats produced by weak states. And it's not clear how much of the strategic lesson has seeped up to the candidates from the advisors who know something about it. But for all the talk of the experience required to be Commander in Chief in the post-9/11 era, it might be useful to start asking...