United States Policy toward Rogue Nations | Introduction
The term “rogue nation” was first adopted by the U.S. government in the 1990s under President Bill Clinton to describe nations that were considered to pose a threat to the United States. The term was controversial from the start, as many world leaders and critics within the United States did not feel it was appropriate for the U.S. government to label entire nations as villainous. Responding partly to such criticisms, in June 2000 the Clinton administration adopted the term “countries of concern” in place of “rogue nations.”
Soon after President George W. Bush took office in 2001, the term “rogue nation” was readopted. One year after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America, the Bush White House issued a formal definition of the term in its National Security Strategy of the United States of America. “In the 1990s we witnessed the emergence of a small number of rogue states that . . . share a number of attributes,” states the document, these states:
• brutalize their own people and squander their national resources for the personal gain of the rulers;
• display no regard for international law, threaten their neighbors, and callously violate international treaties to which they are party;
• are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction, along with other advanced military technology, to be used as threats or offensively to achieve the aggressive designs of these regimes;
• sponsor terrorism around the globe; and
• reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands.
In his 2002 State of the Union address, though he did not use the term “rogue nation,” President Bush singled out three countries—North Korea, Iran, and Iraq—as members of an “axis of evil”:
North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. . . . States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.
In addition to these three countries, the Department of State’s 2002 Pat- terns of Global Terrorism identifies four other nations as state sponsors of terrorism: Cuba, Libya, Syria, and Sudan.
U.S. policy toward rogue nations in a global context
Even more controversial than the definition of the term “rogue nation” is the question of how the United States should deal with countries that sponsor terrorism or pursue the development of biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons. Americans hold a variety of opinions on whether the United States should use diplomacy, economic sanctions, or even military action against rogue nations. An important consideration in these debates is that fact that how the United States chooses to deal with rogue nations affects not just its own national security, but also the complex issue of America’s role in the international community.
For most of the last half of the twentieth century, international relations were dominated by the Cold War. The United States and its allies stood for democracy and free-market capitalism, while the Soviet Union and its allies represented communism. Though the danger of war between the two superpowers was always present, the struggle between them lent a degree of order to international relations. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the international community was left searching for, as the first President Bush put it in his January 1991 State of the Union speech, a “new world order.”
In February 1991, the international community was forced to deal with the rogue nation of Iraq which, under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, had invaded the neighboring nation of Kuwait the previous August. The United States and the United Nations immediately demanded that Iraq withdraw from Kuwait, and the United States began deploying troops in Saudi Arabia. In the following weeks President Bush helped forge a coalition of twenty-eight nations chartered by the United Nations to drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait. U.S. and Allied forces launched the ground war on Kuwait on February 23, and by February 27 the Iraqi occupation army had been driven from Kuwait. On March 31, Iraq accepted the terms of a cease-fire agreement under which Saddam Hussein was allowed to remain in power in Iraq.
Although the term “rogue nation” had not yet been coined, the 1991 Persian Gulf War demonstrated that states such as Iraq, which was armed with chemical weapons and willing to defy international law, posed a great threat to peace in the post–Cold War era. In the first Iraq war, the United States acted multilaterally, as part of a coalition of many nations. The successful cooperation between the United States and the United Nations in the 1991 Gulf War led many experts to believe that such cooperation would become the norm in policing rogue nations in the post–Cold War era. However, twelve years later, in March 2003, the United States again invaded Iraq, with the aid of the United Kingdom but in the face of strong opposition from France, Germany, and Russia, and without the express sanction of the United Nations. This unilateral action against Iraq has raised questions about whether the United States will also seek to use military action against other rogue nations, and if so, whether it will respect the authority of the United Nations. In other words, will the United States act alone in policing rogue nations, or in concordance with the global community of nations?
The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 to bring down the regime of Saddam Hussein. U.S. officials believed Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in violation of UN regulations instituted after the first Iraq war, and that these weapons might be used either by Iraq or terrorist groups. Much of the opposition to the invasion stemmed from the fact that Iraq had not actually used weapons of mass destruction since the 1991 Persian Gulf War. As well, there was only limited evidence that Saddam Hussein had a WMD development program. The U.S. decision to invade Iraq was based largely on the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive war. President Bush first described the doctrine of preemptive war at a June 2002 speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. Referring primarily to Saddam Hussein’s suspected WMD development programs, the president warned that
We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. . . . If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. . . . We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. . . . Our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary.
Bush’s doctrine of preemption was further described in the September 2002 National Security Strategy: “As was demonstrated by the losses on September 11, 2001, mass civilian casualties is the specific objective of terrorists and these losses would be exponentially more severe if terrorists acquired and used weapons of mass destruction. . . . To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.”
Critics of the Bush doctrine of preemption see it as a declaration that the United States will attack any nation it perceives to be a threat, without regard for international law or the United Nations. For example, Harvard University professor Stanley Hoffman writes that the Bush National Security Strategy
presumes that the United States is the sole judge of the legitimacy of its own or anyone else’s preemptive strikes. . . . It promises to maintain whatever military capability is needed to defeat any attempt by any state to impose its will on the United States or its allies, and to dissuade potential adversaries from building up their own forces. . . . In context, it amounts to a doctrine of global domination.
When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 despite UN opposition, many critics saw this as confirmation of Hoffman’s charges.
An American empire?
Even before the 2003 invasion of Iraq was underway, both supporters and critics of the invasion were asking what rogue nation would be the next target in America’s war against terrorism. Some of the possibilities include North Korea, which has been suspected of trying to develop nuclear weapons since the early 1990s, and Iran, Syria, and other Middle Eastern nations that have long been suspected of supporting terrorists. Critics of the Iraq invasion worry that it might be the first in a series of wars designed to eliminate any threats these nations pose to the United States. British political commentator Matthew Parris writes, “I am afraid that [the invasion of Iraq] will prove to be the first in an indefinite series of American interventions. I am afraid this is the beginning of a new empire.”
The concept of an American empire has become a major theme in discussions of U.S. policy toward rogue nations. For many people, the concept of empire is wholly un-American. The United States was founded, after all, on a rejection of British imperial rule. Imperialism contradicts the American belief that people should govern themselves through democratic institutions. “Until very recently,” says Columbia University professor Bruce Robbins, “there was no way you could use the word ‘empire’ in any but a critical sense. It’s been a very, very long American tradition to set ourselves apart from the European notion of empire.”
Supporters of an American empire argue that it would be different from the empires of the past. While the British empire of the nieteenth century served largely to bolster Great Britain’s economy, they argue, the goals of an American empire will be to spread democracy and protect the world from rogue nations. “The Europeans fought to subjugate ‘natives’; Americans will fight to bring them democracy and the rule of law,” writes former Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot. Boot and others believe that the U.S. invasion of Iraq should serve as a starting point for establishing democracy in the Middle East:
The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement [in the Middle East]. . . . Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad. . . . This could be the chance . . . to establish the first Arab democracy.
Boot has called this effort “liberal imperialism,” but others reject the term “imperialism” entirely. “Imperialism means conquest, acquisition—subjugating and taking over some other people and territory for one’s own enrichment and aggrandizement—and the United States is not considering doing that for a second,” says foreign policy scholar Joshua Muravchik. “Exporting democracy is completely different.”
Empire or not, the Unites States is the world’s most powerful nation, in both military and economic terms, and Iraq will not be the last nation to threaten its interests. How the United States chooses to deal with rogue nations—unilaterally or multilaterally, peacefully or through military action, forcing regime change or exporting democracy—will have profound consequences for its security as well as its role within the global community of nations.
