The post-Cold War world posits America as the lone nation-builder among superpowers. From Somalia to Iraq, the U.S. spends billions of dollars on nation-building often with little success. In The Wrong Lessons of the Somalia Debacle, Nicholas Kristof criticizes the U.S.’s role in Somalia and other places where nation-building has been attempted. Kristof admits that “nation-building is a blunder-prone business” but that “it can succeed” (3). Most of the failures that come from nation-building attempts have to do with a lack of international cooperation among nations and organizations like the U.N. Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed that the U.N. failed in its role with respect to preventing war in Iraq.
Many argue that U.S. nation-building efforts fail because the U.S. does not properly build nations but instead exploits them for its own political and economic agenda. Iraqi citizens and soldiers were remiss to trust U.S. forces in the most recent Gulf War because the U.S. abandoned Iraq after the end of the first Gulf War, a move that left many individuals loyal to U.S. efforts at the mercy of Saddam Hussein. Villanova international relations professor Joseph Betz argues that failed nation building is a result of trying to build markets in place of building democracy and democratic institutions. Betz argues this has been the case in many regions, like U.S. nation-building efforts in Chile during the 1970s. As Betz writes, “U.S. foreign policy does not seek to establish democracy; it seeks to establish the form of capitalism which allows large American businesses to dominate in the economy. Acting at the behest of one of these corporations which owned the Chilean telephone system, International Telephone and Telegraph, the U.S. orchestrated the establishment of the cruel military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet” (Betz 1).
Indeed, many argue that Osama bin Laden was able to acquire weapons a...