Lawrence of Arabia and the Perils of State Building by John Hulsman, Ph.D.

Since the end of the Cold War, America's efforts at state building--be it in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan, or Iraq--have suffered from a tendency to reinvent the wheel. That is, policymakers have acted as if these efforts have never been tried before, and consequently, vital lessons that might have been learned as to how the process might better work have instead been neglected. For example, the United States is not the first country to try to forge stable political entities in the Middle East: The lessons of British efforts at state building in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I have been almost entirely neglected, to our peril.