Conventional wisdom among policymakers in both the US and Europe holds that weak and failing states are the source of the world's most pressing security threats today. The international community's leadership sees such states as an existential threat as well, evidenced in Kofi Annan's 2004 claim that “our defenses are only as strong as their weakest links.” This is not surprising. The most destructive attack on the US in its history originated in one of the world's poorest countries. Deadly communicable diseases seem to constantly emerge from the world's poorest regions, and transnational crime appears to flourish in weakly governed states. However, as this book shows, our assumptions about the threats posed by failed and failing states are based on anecdotal arguments, not on a systematic empirical analysis that traces the connections between state failure and transnational security threats. This book uses an Index of State Weakness as a basis for its findings. The book provides coverage of five key security threats: terrorism, transnational crime, WMDs, pandemic diseases, and energy insecurity. The basic conclusions may seem surprising. While many threats do emerge in failed states, more often than not those states' manifold weaknesses create misery for only their own citizenry. In other words, the problems that flow from Liberia's failures are more typical than those that spread from Afghanistan. Moreover, many of threats originate farther up the chain, in wealthier and more stable countries like Russia, China, and Venezuela. And generic state weakness is not a good threat predictor. Cultural and regional particularities as well as the degree of global integration all influence the threat level. Just as importantly, our tendency to extrapolate an all-encompassing theory connecting weak states and international security threats from turmoil in the Middle East and Southwest Asia is insufficient. The book argues for complexity and nuance, and will force policymakers to rethink what they assume about state failure and transnational insecurity.