‘Rogue’ White House Terms Require a Little Explaining

It’s high time to draw up a Devil’s Dictionary of the Clinton administration’s foreign policy--a compendium of the favorite buzzwords, translated into plain English.

What makes the subject ripe is the mess the State Department got into over the idea of a “rogue state,” a vague but catchy phrase the administration has often applied to the likes of Libya, Iraq and North Korea.

For years, the Clinton administration branded Iran as a “rogue state.” But at a recent conference, John Limbert, a State Department official who was among the hostages seized in Tehran when militants took over the U.S. embassy 20 years ago, opined that Iran is a rogue no more.

Limbert is only one individual. Was he reflecting a changed view within the administration about Iran’s credentials as a rogue?

“I don’t want to get into a semantic exchange . . . “ State Department spokesman James Foley told reporters. “There’s been no change in U.S. policy toward Iran.”

With that artful answer, not only did Foley neatly avoid answering the question, but he also belittled the whole issue as one of “semantics”--even though it was the administration that got us into the business of declaring “rogue states” in the first place.

The phrase traces back to 1993 when Anthony Lake, then President Clinton’s national security advisor, declared that one of the main goals of American foreign policy was to isolate certain nations that are “outside the circle of democracy and markets.”

Lake used the phrase “backlash states.” But within days, the administration began calling them “rogue states” and the phrase stuck.

Top-level officials explained that rogue states were those that tried to traffic in weapons of mass destruction, suppressed their own people, engaged in terrorism or threatened their neighbors.

That raised more questions than it answered. Would China, for example, fit under that umbrella?

Since the administration has trouble explaining such ideas, let’s try to come up with some of our own definitions:

Rogue State

A country that meets two conditions: It does things the Clinton administration doesn’t like AND it is one that the administration doesn’t want to do business with. If the country is a big commercial market or strategically important, the term might not apply, regardless of the country’s behavior. Thus Libya is a rogue state, China is not, and Iran seems to be in transition.

Engagement

The administration’s policy toward countries that do bad things and that might otherwise be declared rogue states but that the Clinton administration DOES want to do business with.

Cookie Cutter

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s derogatory term for logical consistency. Albright is regularly asked why America tries to isolate Communist Cuba even as it applies its policy of engagement toward China. She has a stock, dismissive answer. “We do not have a cookie-cutter approach to policy,” she says with great force, as if that explained everything.

Agreed Framework

A deal the Clinton administration negotiates with a rogue state and doesn’t want to have to submit to Congress. In the old days, American presidents negotiated treaties. But the Constitution says that treaties have to be approved by two-thirds of the Senate and so presidents began negotiating deals that were called agreements.

Congress now requires that some agreements need its approval by majority vote. So five years ago, Clinton took this idea one novel step further. To stop North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, the administration negotiated with that rogue state something it called an “agreed framework.” This fell one step short of an “agreement” and didn’t have to go to Congress at all--even though, ever since, the administration has accorded this deal the reverence given to a treaty.

Think of the possibilities this idea opens up. At the end of World War I, Woodrow Wilson could have brought the United States into the League of Nations under an “agreed framework.” The Mexican War might have ended with the Agreed Framework of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Senior Administration Official

Anyone in the U.S. government who ranks higher than a letter carrier. When they don’t want to be quoted by name, Washington officials say: “Just call me a senior administration official”--regardless of how high they actually rank.

A Nexis search shows that in 1998, the New York Times carried 200 stories that cited a “senior administration official.” The Washington Post carried 158 such stories and the Los Angeles Times, 78.

None of the newspapers carried so much as a single reference to a “junior administration official.” What we have here, I think, is a serious case of source inflation.

My list is only a beginning. I welcome readers to send me their own examples for the new Devil’s Dictionary.

Mann’s column appears in this space on Wednesdays.