How to build a State in a non State environment?

[Dayuhan]

We have grown increasing unconstrained in our own behavior, but still work at least as hard as before to constrain the behavior of others.

I've seen this allegation before, but I've yet to see it substantiated in any way. Have our interventions actually increased since the end of the cold war? I think not.

No, I mean more a commitment to protect. Not to protect a particular government, but rather to protect the populaces within particular regions from internal and external abuses of government without overly skewing that support by our own biases and interests. This is the future for intervention whether we like it or not. Empowered populaces and non-state actors will continue to punish states who overstep the boundaries of such relationships to exert their own will over that of the populace there.

Are we really overstepping those boundaries? Our post-9/11 extravagances in Iraq and Afghanistan certainly did, but as a general rule our attitude toward "failed states" has been to deter, contain, and ignore. There's very little to suggest any appetite for repeating the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan: if politicians haven't learned a lesson the populace has, and on the basis of political will alone regime change is, at least until memory fades, as dead as the dodo bird.

A commitment to protect is a nice idea, but it's not likely to be the future of intervention, for the US at least. Sustained deployment of US forces is simply too expensive to be justified in the absence of any direct threat or interest. Americans may feel sorry for the people of Zimbabwe or Myanmar, Somalia or the DRC, but shelling out a few hundred billions from our pockets is a bit more sympathy than we're prepared to express.