The Red Cell series is published in collaboration with the Stimson Center. Drawing upon the legacy of the CIA’s Red Cell—established following the September 11 attacks to avoid similar analytic failures in the future—the project works to challenge assumptions, misperceptions, and groupthink with a view to encouraging alternative approaches to America’s foreign and national security policy challenges. For more information about the Stimson Center’s Red Cell Project, see here.

Red Cell

In an increasingly Hobbesian world that seems to be spinning out of control, there are currently some fifty state-based conflicts—more than at any time since World War II. Yet, not too long ago, an international consensus had emerged on the importance of an effective, shared response to instability—whether violent or substantial breakdowns in public order, mass migrations, or humanitarian crises. This was exemplified by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s remarks in the introduction to the 2010 Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review: “We will . . . bring together like-minded people and nations to solve the pressing problems we all face.” The momentum of that more consensual era was enshrined in the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG 16): “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.” 

Rarely, however, did such initiatives result in improved outcomes. As UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed said of SDG 16 in May, “...looking around the world today, we see these ideals growing more distant by the day.”

Nonetheless, the fervent belief that fragile states and ungoverned spaces were threats to global security and, by extension, U.S. national interests was mirrored in U.S. policymakers’ national security thinking during most of the first two decades of this millennium. This generated a relatively durable international consensus based on U.S. leadership, which led to sustained efforts at conflict resolution, including an ambitious UN peacekeeping agenda. Ungoverned spaces were seen as breeding grounds and safe havens for those who challenged the international order, including insurgents, terrorists, human traffickers, and drug dealers. U.S. allies and partners supported policies and programs to bring peace and security to these regions. 

Making the same security calculus, much of the broader international community offered its support as well. Various partners undertook complementary or parallel efforts to those the United States was spearheading. The UN, for example, ramped up its efforts on peacebuilding, mediation, and civilian protection. Even U.S. adversaries, while not taking the lead, did not block these efforts. For example, multiple UN Security Council resolutions and presidential statements were adopted that upheld the responsibility to protect civilians. Building on the P-5 consensus on humanitarian interventions established at the end of the Cold War, these efforts, such as in Somalia and Bosnia, involved a wider range of tasks beyond traditional peacekeeping. Some regional multilateral organizations, such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, also reinforced their efforts to assist in governance reforms in the former Soviet states in Central Asia and Southeast Europe. 

A Fraying International Consensus

That now seems like a forgotten era. Why? The United States, through its eagerness to overthrow governments with little apparent thought to the resulting governance challenges, bears significant responsibility for the ensuing chaos. Moreover, the reappearance of increasing great power competition (GPC) in the 2010s undermined a global consensus on the need for peace and security. What had once been almost a monopoly by the “indispensable nation” started to fragment. 

The practical effect of this fraying international consensus became more apparent in the millennium’s second decade as failing or fragile states faced a toxic mix of seemingly intractable challenges, including extreme poverty, forced displacement, climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and low-capacity institutions. Many of these states, such as Afghanistan and a number in sub-Saharan Africa, were resistant to outside efforts to build pathways to effective governance. Half-hearted, short-term international responses could not achieve lasting solutions to deep-seated conflicts. As the Fund for Peace’s Fragile State Index for 2018 stated, “...conflict continues to rage…[t]he signs of continued instability and potential conflict in many parts of the world continue.” The World Bank noted in its Fragility, Conflict, and Violence (FCV) May 2024 overview: “By 2030, nearly 60 percent of the world’s extreme poor will live in countries affected by FCV.”

The Reappearance of Great Power Rivalries

As great power rivalries heated up, the civil unrest in Libya was a pivot point, particularly for UN Security Council functionality. Concerted international support for action to rein in Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was followed by a NATO operation that appeared in retrospect to be much more aggressive and interventionist than Moscow, Beijing, and others had been led to believe. NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya, based on a UNSC Resolution—pushed by the UK and France but implicitly blessed by Washington—expanded into a larger operation that resulted in regime change, continuing chaos, and an internationalized civil war, leaving Moscow feeling misled.

The Libya experience provided an impetus for a rising China and an emboldened Russia to challenge what they saw as a fragmenting U.S.-dominated international order. Moscow’s approach to shared international action in Syria in 2012 was markedly different than its approach to Libya—blocking effective international cooperation while supporting Bashar al-Assad. This impacted joint efforts where an effective and sustained international effort to respond to crises in states such as Sudan, South Sudan, and Haiti fell short despite recognized high-priority transnational threats such as terrorism and refugee flows. 

Throughout the 2010s, this growing divergence among great powers on fostering peace and security still managed to coexist with traditional forms of great power cooperation on some major security concerns. For example, Russia and China regularly acquiesced to annual extensions of UN peacekeeping missions, which they, particularly China, saw could serve their global goals and aspirations. However, both P-5 members increasingly used their vetoes to block a proactive international posture toward governance and human rights. China sought to project a narrower, not always benign, national interest through alternative parallel mechanisms, such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which led to confusion, particularly among African states, and sometimes stalemate. U.S. protectionism has further exacerbated that trend, leaving China as the largest trading partner for most of the world’s countries. 

This was accompanied by the increasing awareness in Moscow, Beijing, and some other capitals that fragile settings or “low-governance” spaces, rather than posing a national security threat, presented an opportunity to expand influence and weaken a Western-led international consensus on stability. For Moscow, this took the form of more aggressive and overt support, often through proxies, to be increasingly assertive in challenging concerted international efforts to prop up governing institutions in places as far-flung as Syria, Libya, and West Africa, where the involvement of the Wagner Group notably shifted the regional political dynamic. China took a more subtle approach by expanding infrastructure investments in some countries where governing authorities struggled with public legitimacy and credibility. Client states, beholden to more autocratic regimes, are often willing to reject broad-based efforts to reduce conflict and instability in favor of unbridled natural resource extraction that benefits a new class of ruling elites. 

Russia’s recent success in leveraging this dynamic is apparent in a number of places, notably in West Africa, where UN peacekeepers were told to leave Mali (following France’s 2022 departure). Meanwhile, the United States recently agreed to Niamey’s requests to close its military base in Niger. In both cases, Russian proxy forces, including Wagner Group mercenaries, were omnipresent and expected to reap the benefits of increased instability and reduced scrutiny. At the same time, the UN Security Council, while extending most current peacekeeping missions, has not approved any new ones since 2017, partly because of Russia’s reluctance to counter forces and movements that undermine the legitimacy of existing governing bodies and institutions. Moscow has paid the price for its new military activism: fighting in Mali in late July 2024 resulted in the reported deaths of fifty Russian mercenaries.

China has changed its tack, using economic soft power across the Global South through trade and its BRI to present an alternative vision for the global order. Beijing’s stated intention is to assist with the continent's modernization and foster “win-win” cooperation, although much of China’s effort is centered on extracting minerals critical to Chinese industry. The World Economic Forum, in a recent report, cited a total cumulative Chinese investment under the BRI of $1 trillion in 200 projects across 150 countries. The increasing debt African countries have accumulated with China, along with those from increased health expenditures to counter the pandemic, now severely constrain public finances for other priorities and risk-reducing those governments’ legitimacy.

This newer version of Russian and Chinese involvement in the Global South during the past decade has enhanced the patron-client relationship and magnified existing trends of inequality in the Global North. Increased instability and fragility of the poorer Global South countries are corollary costs, if not an explicit feature of this trend. Poor Global South countries, as they have faced a reversal in the growth of their meager share of global income, believe the West is unable or unwilling to do much to alter these trends and are pursuing their interests by engaging with China and Russia.