‘Rogue’ Labels Put U.S. in Straightjacket

Under the Bush administration, we once again have “rogue states.” This term, wisely if belatedly abandoned by the Clinton administration last June, would better have been left dead as a policy designation. Now, instead, it seems to be a lead factor in the Bush administration’s move to establish a ballistic missile defense.

In diplomacy, words shape policy. “Rogue state” is a lazy convenience that has obscured our understanding of the countries branded with the rubric. Worse, by typecasting the countries with whom we should have no dealings as pariahs, it distorts our policy toward them. It was no mere obsession with language that led the Clinton administration to change this term to the infelicitous but less constraining “states of concern.”

Until last summer, the Clinton administration had asserted that “rogue states” constituted a distinct category of nations in the post-Cold War world. Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Libya were the core members of this rogues’ gallery.

Yet, because this label had no standing in international law and was quintessentially political, its usage was selective and contradictory. Syria, a state that possesses weapons of mass destruction and has sponsored terrorism, was omitted from the rogue list because of its importance to the Middle East peace process. Cuba, on the other hand, which no longer poses a real security threat, was occasionally included because that played well to the Cuban emigre community.

In addition, the Clinton administration discovered that the term used to mobilize political support for one policy could be turned against it on another, as when a Republican critic called for the cancellation of a presidential visit to China in 1998 because it was a “rogue state.”

By lumping and demonizing a disparate group of countries, the Clinton administration was pushed toward a generic strategy of containment and isolation. And why not, when they were all “rogue states”?

This constricting approach came up against hard political realities, first with North Korea in 1994, when the acute danger posed by the North’s advanced nuclear weapons program necessitated negotiation, and then with Iran in 1997, after the election of a reformist president created an opportunity for U.S. diplomacy to influence, albeit marginally, that country’s political evolution.

When the president’s foreign policy team realized that the “rogue state” stamp had straitjacketed them, they formally dropped the term.

The revival of “rogue” rhetoric is linked to the Bush administration’s efforts to drum up support for a national missile defense. The “rogue” label carries the dubious connotation of a “crazy” state not susceptible to traditional deterrence of the kind that worked during the Gulf War even with the ruthlessly expansionist, but not irrational, Saddam Hussein.

Critics wrongly condemned the Clinton administration’s dropping of the “rogue” term as political spin to rationalize an engagement policy toward odious regimes. To the contrary, jettisoning this flawed category allowed us to differentiate between cases; it did not commit us to blanket engagement. Iraq is a case in point, where the threat posed by Hussein requires a continued policy of containment and isolation.

The Bush administration should continue to develop a repertoire of country-specific strategies and not revive a generic policy with significant liabilities. The administration should focus on state behavior--anywhere--that violates established international norms; it should not base policy on a unilateral American political concept.

The alternative approach should command broad international legitimacy and provide a basis for accountability, for example, to indict war criminals. But here at home, such an approach would challenge the Bush administration to make the case meeting each threat on its own terms--and not by reviving a discarded concept that confuses more than informs our foreign policy debate.