Human Capital and National Security

Most Americans are repulsed by governments that fail to provide good governance and security to their populations. But most are also reluctant to ask their own governments to take action or spend money to remedy such problems, especially after nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq failed to live up to expectations. In the current climate of declining budgets and skepticism about the effectiveness of foreign aid, the only way to convince the American people to invest in the third world is to show that it will both enhance American security and save American lives and money. As this and subsequent chapters will show, human capital investments are inexpensive in relation to the threats they mitigate, and they often yield dividends at rates that rapidly recoup the initial outlays. THE THIRD WORLD AND U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY At the start of the Cold War, the earth was said to have three worlds. The first world consisted of the United States, the other industrialized democracies of the West, and Japan. The second world encompassed the Soviet Union and the communist nations of Eastern Europe, mortal ideological enemies of the first world. Soviet efforts to convince Western Europe's first world countries to switch sides came to naught, in part because of American infusions of money into Western Europe through the Marshall Plan. America's entreaties to Eastern Europe's second world countries also failed to yield converts, because Soviet tanks showed up whenever the Eastern Europeans tried to break ties with Moscow. The countries most receptive to first and second world solicitations, and hence the ones that would be most fiercely contested, were the nations lying outside of the first two worlds, termed the third world. Lacking the modern industries of the first and second worlds, the countries of the third world were much weaker economically and militarily. Most of the third world countries in Asia and Africa had been European colonies before World War II and owed their newfound independence to a combination of European debilitation during the war and the rise of indigenous nationalism. Set adrift in a sea of global struggle between the great powers, they found themselves incessantly courted by the emissaries of the United States and the Soviet Union and the smaller nations of the first two worlds.