It's a very good question. Let me give you an example, because I think this is something that the new secretary-general is really on the money with in terms of his focus.
It's a lot about preventing those failed states, because it's much more complex to pick up the pieces afterwards. He's looking at how we use diplomacy, how we use aid, and how we use various measures to stop things getting even worse.
That really struck me on my recent visit to Myanmar. I went to Rakhine, where this conflict has broken out with the Rohingya, a Muslim population. My sense from that visit was that there is a terrible conflict going on in Rakhine, but it's going to be a much worse conflict in the future if we don't nip it in the bud now, because those young people—who have been brutalized by the Burmese or Myanmar military in response to what happened in the human rights abuses, and then put in camps where they're not allowed to leave—are going to be recruited by extremists in the long term. You can already see that beginning to happen.
Myanmar is a country with a new leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who is very committed to making progress, but within it, it has a conflict in Rakhine and it has a conflict in Kachin. If these conflicts get completely out of control, it will undermine the whole future of Myanmar, but it will also cause regional instability. ISIS and others are already viewing the injustices being committed in that country as an opportunity to recruit those people, and there's a big link with some extremist groups in Bangladesh.
This is one example. Kofi Annan has set out a road map for dealing with it; there's a big meeting in Myanmar. Putting a lot of effort into stopping countries from becoming failed states—pulling them back from the brink—would be the most important.
Somewhere like South Sudan, which is a very good example of a country that's tipped, the honest truth is what we do is sticking plaster on the wound. We're basically trying to keep children alive, because everything else has failed. We're not addressing the root causes. To address the root causes, you need leadership, and the leaders of that country on both sides need to step up to the mark. They need to stop the fighting, they need to reach agreement, and they need to move forward.
The international community can help in that, but a lot of effort and money has been poured into South Sudan, including from Canadians, and until you get the leadership from the politicians—the government and the opposition—it's going to be very hard to make progress.
The only bit that I think we can do better as an international community than we've done in the past is the peacekeeping part of it. That, again, is keeping the lid on it. It's not solving it, but I don't think the whole peacekeeping operation in South Sudan has been that good. When that violence broke out in Juba, it wasn't just the terrible rape and killing of some of the international journalists and those aid workers that we all read about. Thousands and thousands of not just South Sudanese, but also Kenyan and Ethiopian women were raped. The stories I heard when I was in Juba—about militias rounding up all the Kenyan and Ethiopian women, taking them out into the bush, and putting them in camps and raping them for weeks—never got international attention. The stories that came out were the terrible and unacceptable rapes of those aid workers, but the peacekeepers.... You have to ask, what was the point of having a peacekeeping mission if they didn't step into that type of situation?
In peacekeeping, we can do more, but ultimately in a situation like South Sudan, this famine is man-made and can be solved if we have leadership from the politicians.