by Susan E. Rice
Basic intuition suggests that pervasive poverty and grotesque disparities breed resentment, hostility, and insecurity. Nevertheless, a significant amount of punditry and even academic effort has been devoted to discrediting the notion that poverty in other countries has any security consequence for Americans. The most frequently invoked canards draw on oversimplified truisms, such as that poverty does not cause terrorism because the 9/11 hijackers were mainly middle-class, educated Saudis; if poor people were prone to be terrorists, then Africa and not the Middle East would be the hotbed of terrorism; and poor people are too busy just trying to survive to do anyone harm. All these statements are superficial and flawed, but assume for a moment they are true. Assume that an individual’s economic impoverishment has nothing to do with his or her decisions about whether or not to engage in acts of violence. Would that be a rational basis for concluding that global poverty has no security significance to the United States? Some would have us believe so, but they would be mistaken.
For even if poverty at the individual level were of no security significance to the United States and other developed countries (dubious though that proposition is), poverty is highly significant at the country level. Poor states typically fail to meet the basic needs of many of their citizens—for food, clean water, health care, or education. The same poor states that cannot fulfill their core responsibilities to provide security or sustenance to their own people may also fail to exercise effective sovereign control over their territory. Poor states often lack the legal, police, intelligence, or security sector capacity to control their borders and remote areas and to prevent plundering of their natural resources.
The fact that the impact of poverty and weak states on U.S. and global security is not simple, linear, or necessarily swift does not make the linkage any less real or significant. Efforts to illuminate the complex relationship between poverty and insecurity may be unwelcome to those who want assurance that global poverty and U.S. national security are unrelated. Yet we ignore or obscure the implications of global poverty for global security at our peril.
Susan E. Rice is a former assistant secretary of state for African Affairs in the Clinton administration. The article was excerpted from a longer study published in Too Poor For Peace?: Global Poverty, Conflict, and Security in the 21st Century, edited by Lael Brainard and Derek Chollet and published by Brookings Institution Press, 2007.
