Treat the world like a failed state; then you can understand the players needed to fix it.
The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.
We can't afford to see Afghanistan roll backwards into a failed state that could become a base from which terrorist campaigns can be launched anywhere in the world.
'The world's wealthiest failed state,' as it has come to be known, Belgium endured 589 days without a functioning elected government between June 2010 and December 2011 and remains a dysfunctional, linguistically divided waxworks of one federal and five regional-cultural parliaments.
The central thesis of the American failure in Afghanistan - the one you'll hear from politicians and pundits and even scholars - was succinctly propounded by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage: 'The war in Iraq drained resources from Afghanistan before things were under control'.
Or you can be like the Soviet Union, start out with ideals, and end up ceasing to exist.
A failed Iraq would make America less secure.
Trying to rebuild Afghanistan on the cheap has left the country in the hands of warlords and an impotent Northern Alliance puppet regime that runs Kabul and nothing else.
Once the U.S. and NATO walked away from Libya, a chaotic, lawless state in the soft underbelly of Europe arose.
I think the biggest challenge for Somalia has been the sense that it is a hopeless case of incomprehensible internal conflicts and there is nothing we can do.
Refugees are the human dimensions of a failed state.
Instead, we did take our eye off the ball. We decided, instead of finishing the job in Afghanistan, to go into Iraq. And today, unfortunately, if you look at the situation on the ground, it is a mess.
What we now have in Iraq is a defeat.
We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure.
Clinton appears to be the sole holdout in the Obama administration in understanding the catastrophe caused by its foreign policy in Libya.
We in the West walked away from Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War and left it as a country devastated socially and armed to the teeth. If we do that again, there will be consequences.
In a banana republic, one might slip on a banana peel but things do work - now and then for the people, albeit inefficiently and unreliably.
The United States has entered the ranks of the failed states. One of the most remarkable manifestations of a failed state is that the criminals are all inside the government operating against the people, whereas in a normal state, the criminals are on the outside of the government, operating against it. So, we now have every manifestation of being a failed state, with the government in the hands of a few Wall Street gangsters.
We have a failed state in Syria.
Pakistan is a nation, which, if it falls apart, if it becomes a failed state, there are nuclear weapons there and you've got terrorists there who could grab their hands onto those nuclear weapons.
Yet, here we are, long and difficult years into that conflict," ... "we still have not created the state we promised them. On the contrary, our costly and valiant efforts have produced an outcome our government did not predict or intend-a failed state spinning out of control into anarchy and civil war.
Let's face it, the U. S. mission in Somalia has changed from saving lives to saving face.
We pulled out of Libya. Now look what's happened: a safe haven, a vacuum, ISIS training militants to hit in Tunisia.
The system of government in Pakistan doesn't work. It's corrupt, and the people are tired of it.
Libya is a failed state and becoming a launching pad for external operations, as is Sinai in Egypt.
