Confronting Poverty: Weak States and U.S. National Security

Description

The United States current UN Ambassador and its Ambassador to Mexico spearhead an investigation of the connections between poverty and fragile states, as well as the effects on American security. Confronting Poverty is a timely reminder that alleviating global poverty and shoring up weak states are not only humanitarian and economic imperatives, but key components of a more balanced and sustainable U.S. national security strategy. To quote Susan Rice s Introduction: "In today s world, risks to U.S. national security extend well beyond a handful of hostile states. Foremost among them are transnational security threats that, by definition, are not limited to any individual state. They include terrorism, weapons proliferation, the global economic crisis, conflict, infectious disease, international crime and narcotics flows, climate change, and environmental degradation. These transnational phenomena can threaten U.S. national security because they have the potential to kill significant numbers of Americans whether swiftly or over an extended period of time." Rice and her colleagues then elucidate on these threats and how to counter them. The overarching policy recommendation emerging from this book is the need to alleviate poverty and build capacity in weak states in order to break the vicious cycle of poverty, state weakness, and transnational threats. Confronting Poverty grows out of a project on global poverty and U.S. national security that Susan Rice directed at Brookings from 2002 through January 2009, before she was appointed U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations. It builds on the findings of the Index of State Weakness in the Developing World, an analytic tool that Rice published in a 2008 Brookings report coauthored with Stewart Patrick, now at the Council on Foreign Relations.