ABSTRACT
Naturally, not everyone agrees that development assistance and security should be fused this way. During the 2000 U.S. political campaign, presidential candidate George W. Bush routinely dismissed nation building as an arrogant and futile exercise that did not serve the U.S. strategic interest. He called for pulling out of multinational military and development efforts in remote, unstable countries. After September 11, 2001, however, Bush did a U-turn and joined other countries in what he specifically called a nation-building exercise to establish a broad-based government in Afghanistan (White House 2001). Making no comment on the incongruity with his earlier stand, Bush explicitly drew the parallel with the Marshall Plan after World War II (White House 2002b). Bad governance and the disintegration of authority in peripheral states evidently sometimes did threaten the safety of the U.S. population, and might even justify pre-emptive military action to replace a system of public institutions and create new processes for public decision-making, as in Iraq in 2003.
