Word: weak
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...more than 5,000 words, Edwards mentioned China and India once each. He breezed through Russia in a few paragraphs. His most specific proposal was a "Marshall Corps" to help countries in crisis. And when he listed future missions for the military, he cited the challenge from "weak and failing" states before the challenge from potential great powers...
Barack Obama must have been nodding in agreement. In his own address a few weeks earlier, Obama dwelled on "impoverished, weak and ungoverned states." China came up twice. He did linger over Russia but less as a powerful competitor than as a country too impoverished, weak and ungoverned to safeguard its nukes...
There's a lot to recommend this view. For starters, it gets jihadism right. Al-Qaeda-- style terrorism does stem more from state breakdown than state power. (Compare pre- and post-Saddam Iraq.) The weak-state concept also makes Democratic foreign policy broader than its Republican equivalent. In Bush-esque speeches this spring, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani tried--unconvincingly--to cram virtually all of American foreign policy into the war on terror. Weak states, by contrast, offer Democrats a prism that isn't confined to the Islamic world...
...enough. Great-power competition isn't a historical artifact. The next President will spend countless hours managing China's rising influence in Asia, which threatens to marginalize the U.S. and our close ally, Japan. And he or she will have real problems with Russia, which although domestically weak throws its weight around overseas, jockeying for clout in the former Soviet Union and using its gas exports to bully Western Europe. Dealing with Moscow and Beijing will require strategic judgment, not humanitarian action. And if Democratic candidates avoid it, they risk confirming the stereotype that Democrats see foreign policy as social...
...India aren't part of the solution. The U.S. doesn't have the power or credibility to design and enforce rules for how other nations should handle public health, weapons proliferation, the environment or almost anything else without other big countries on board. The U.S.'s efforts to help weak states will largely depend on how well we cooperate with strong ones...