‘Rogue State’ Label Was a Bad Fit

The State Department has just expunged the term “rogue state” from its foreign-policy lexicon and replaced it with the more diplomatic-sounding “states of concern.” Critics have dismissed the move as an Orwellian word game.

Yet dropping the “rogue” rubric to describe a disparate group of states--currently Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Libya--is not merely an issue of semantics. Words shape and affect policy. This political slogan has promoted a constricting and generic strategy. Its demise will increase the latitude U.S. policymakers have to pursue a repertoire of targeted policies that address the particular circumstances in each of these states.

The “rogue state” policy emerged from the 1991 Gulf War experience, a “hot” war that coincided with the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet threat. In the wake of these twin events, Bush administration officials warned that the main danger to international peace stemmed from the “Iraqs of the future”--i.e., a Third World state possessing weapons of mass destruction, sponsoring terrorism and threatening U.S. interests in key regions.

The Clinton administration further developed this theme, arguing that “rogue” regimes exhibiting these characteristics constituted one of four distinct categories of states in the post-Cold War world--the other three being advanced democracies, emerging market democracies and “failed” states. After North Korea’s long-range missile test in August 1998, the administration announced plans to accelerate the creation of an anti-missile system to defend against the threat from “rogue states.”

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared that “dealing with the rogue states is one of the great challenges of our time . . . because they are there with the sole purpose of destroying the system.”

But the Clinton administration’s approach toward the diverse countries lumped under this generic heading exposed the inadequacies and liabilities of the “rogue state” concept as a basis for policy. Although the term ostensibly referred to countries that violated accepted international norms, “rogue state” was a political label with no standing in international law that was rejected by the United States’ major allies.

Because it was analytically soft and quintessentially political, U.S. officials applied this pejorative term selectively. Syria, which met all of the defining criteria, was excluded from the rogues’ gallery because of its importance to the Middle East peace process, while Cuba, which no longer poses a security threat, was occasionally included.

The most significant liability of the rogue state approach was its impact on strategy formulation and execution. The policy was essentially a political mobilization strategy that grouped together a disparate set of countries and demonized them. This pushed policymakers into a one-size-fits-all strategy of comprehensive containment and isolation. And once these states were declared beyond the pale and relegated to the “rogue” category, it was politically difficult, as the Clinton administration discovered, to pursue an alternative approach in response to changed circumstances. Even a modest deviation from the template strategy was castigated by hard-line critics as tantamount to appeasement.

The Clinton administration confronted this hard political reality in the case of North Korea. The acute danger posed by its drive for nuclear weapons and the absence of any better alternative policy forced the U.S. to negotiate with the North and led to the October 1994 accord that froze Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

Likewise in Iran, when reformist President Mohammad Khatami was elected, the Clinton administration was hamstrung in its efforts to explore a new policy with relation to the country because of Iran’s stigmatized status as a rogue state.

The alternative to the rogue state approach is to develop differentiated strategies addressed to the particular conditions in each country. Policymakers still would have the option of containment and isolation. Abandoning the use of the “rogue state” label emphatically is not an argument for blanket engagement of every odious regime. For example, Iran’s domestic politics create opportunities the U.S. can pursue, while in Iraq, politics beyond Saddam Hussein’s cult of personality simply do not exist.

The shift from a generic to targeted approach will require policymakers to make the case for distinct strategies toward these states without reference to the emotive “rogue state” formula. The jettisoning of this flawed political slogan will promote a more sound and effective American foreign policy.