The latest attempt to impose Pax Americana in the Middle East and Central Asia may not last for more than a few years, but history advises us to expect recurrent visions of the US Manifest Destiny. International efforts to reconstruct failed or destroyed states have regularly occurred since the mid-20th century. External attempts at nationbuilding— though they are really aimed at restoring effective states, not creating new nations—by one or a coalition of governments are neither new nor unique. Lessons have been accumulating for more than 300 years as dominant powers have engaged in regime change and post-conflict reconstruction, often in ignorance of previous efforts.

The US military occupation of Japan and Germany and the Marshall Plan for Western Europe marked the start of the modern era of post-war nation-building as an instrument of foreign policy. World War II nation-building was pursued not only by US and Western European governments, but also by international organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations as the US government attempted to wrap its own policies with UN peacekeeping operations or the work of international development organizations. World Bank lending for post-conflict reconstruction increased 800 percent between 1980 and 1998 to US$6.2 billion; by 2002, it was allotting 16 percent of total lending for this purpose.

Is Nation-building Successful?

Far from being diversions from US foreign policy, recent military invasions and reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq continue the United States' long history of forcibly replacing threatening regimes in other countries. US nation-building has yielded some luminous successes (Japan, Germany, Taiwan), some dismal failures (Haiti, Cuba, Vietnam, Somalia), and some bafflingly inconclusive results (Philippines, Kosovo). US interventions have prolonged indigenous conflicts by taking one side (Middle East) and by befriending both (Far East, Africa). Active interventions have left behind a dictatorship (Argentina), a democracy (Puerto Rico), an autocracy (Kuwait), and an ethnocracy (Israel).

The public is often unaware of how infrequently post-conflict nation-building has succeeded. The World Bank found in its experience that countries emerging from war had a 50 percent chance of relapsing into conflict within five years. In a study for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper reviewed 16 major US-led nation-building efforts since 1900 and concluded that in only four countries—West Germany, Japan, Grenada, and Panama—did the types of democratic governance systems that the United States sought to build continue after 10 years. In only five cases were democratic regimes sustained for more than three years after the United States withdrew. In Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Cambodia, and Vietnam, dictatorships quickly emerged after US military forces left the country. US forces were driven out of Lebanon after regime change and nation-building efforts failed in the early 1980s and a decade later from Somalia under similar circumstances.

International organizations' peacekeeping and nationbuilding policies have not fared much better. UN Trusteeships in Kosovo and East Timor during the 1990s have been criticized for failing to establish strong, autonomous, and sustainable states in the aftermath of wars in those territories; the dispatch of envoys to the Sudan and Colombia failed to settle long-raging internal conflicts, and after more than a decade the supervisory mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina still had not restored effective indigenous governance to that war-torn area. Even after prolonged UN supervision, the 2002 elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina merely returned to power ethnic nationalists that were involved in the original conflicts. After a decade under UN oversight, democracy in Cambodia is far from institutionalized and elections are still riddled with corruption, violence, and fraud. UN peacekeeping and nation-building operations in Somalia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone failed to achieve either goal and in other countries they encountered complex constraints that made even humanitarian relief efforts difficult.

The disappointing results of nation-building can be explained by the complexity of attempting to rebuild war-torn countries with "failed" or "collapsed" states. In many of these countries, external or indigenous efforts at regime replacement began due to the government's disintegrating capacity to govern because of political and administrative weaknesses, general lawlessness and corruption, ethnic tensions and conflict, economic depression, financial crises, or totalitarianism. Even if the equivalent of "denazification" has taken place, the challenge of administering reconstruction still requires new procedures beyond cleansed bureaucracies. New structures are needed, especially if part of the donor's role is delegated to a United Nations, a NATO, or an ad hoc coalition.

Nation-building as a Policy

Whatever relationships are arranged among donors, the process of nation-building is best served when it is viewed as a coherent policy whose elements are complete—but separate—from other governmental functions. Although it embodies the goals of several parties and consumes and generates resources of its own, nation- building aims at integration with some future governance. It can be conceived as a distinct, even constant, policy of the United States rather than as a few scattered episodes of military conquest or international assistance. Its recurrence suggests that it is more than a sideline for occasional military and diplomatic operations, and its effects transcend the expected consequences of either.

In the absence of an explicit policy, donor governments and international organizations are likely to ignore or fail to address important conditions for success in post-conflict nation-building or to coordinate essential components of reconstruction. Former US Ambassador to Mozambique, Dennis Jett, blames the failures of peacekeeping in that country—and in others in Africa—on the inability of United Nations and other international organizations to recognize and plan for the different requirements of what he labeled the pre-deployment, deployment, and post-deployment stages of regime change and nation-building.

Other observers noted the inability of UN operations in Cambodia to provide an integrated strategy and oversight for the military intervention and reconstruction phases of nation-building in that country. The two related functions of peacekeeping and nation-building were conducted as separate activities by different organizations. Pei and Kaspar drew similar conclusions in the 16 cases they examined in which the United States attempted nation-building. They claimed three critical variables (the country's internal characteristics, the convergence of geopolitical interests, and the commitment to economic development) were treated separately, causing mixed results or outright failures.