US Foreign Policy and the Rogue State Doctrine

Alex Miles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135097806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Concerns over Iran's nuclear programme, North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship and, in the past, Iraq's apparent pursuit of WMD have captured the world's attention, and dominated the agenda of the American foreign policy establishment. But, what led policymakers and the US military to emphasise the threat of rogue states at the end of the Cold War?

Going behind the vivid language of the 'axis of evil' and portrayals of undeterrable and reckless rogue states, this work demonstrates how the rogue state doctrine satisfied both domestic and international goals in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, underpinning efforts to maintain US leadership and hegemony. It offers a clear picture of the policymaking process, taking a broad, historical approach that places the actions of US officials towards Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya and Cuba in a wider context. Through an understanding of the long-standing influences on the US approach we are better able to appreciate why, for instance, regime change dominated the post-9/11 agenda and led to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Explaining in detail how the tackling of rogue states became a central aim of US foreign policy, Miles examines whether there was continuity between the Clinton and Bush approach. He moves on to highlight the influence of Congress on the implementation of US policies and the difficulties the US faced in 'selling' its approach to allies and adapting its hard-line strategies to reflect developments within the targeted states.

By considering the impulses and drivers behind the development of the rogue states approach, this work will extend the scope of existing work in the field and will be of interest to scholars and policymakers alike.

1
Introduction

The rogue states doctrine entered the policy lexicon during the Bill Clinton administration, replacing Soviet communism as the fundamental challenge to US national security and becoming pivotal to the ‘war on terror’ declared by George W. Bush in 2001. Policymakers in the Clinton and Bush administrations focused their attention on a small group of regimes that seemed to exhibit destabilising and threatening external behaviour, alongside deep-rooted antipathy to the US. The roster of rogue states remained consistent from the Reagan years to the post-9/11 era, with Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya and Cuba targeted for their pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), support or sponsorship of international terrorism, suppression of basic human rights, and opposition to the US political and social system. Only those states that possessed all of the above characteristics qualified as rogues (Cuba being the exception), ensuring that the list was short, manageable and enduring. While the actions of the rogue states led to high-profile episodes of tension in the period under consideration, the character of the nations in question was used by American policymakers to serve domestic political goals, such as mobilising support for US international engagement, maintaining high defence spending and justifying the construction of a National Missile Defence (NMD) system. The ‘rogue state’ label, which encompassed other pejorative terms like ‘outlaw’ and ‘pariah’, is a distinctly American approach that led to worst-case scenario thinking about the regimes in question and encouraged the perception that they required containing, isolating and, particularly in the George W. Bush years, removal from power, rather than diplomatic engagement.

Advancing from the perspective of the contemporary historian, and with sufficient time having passed to allow a degree of perspective on the Clinton presidency and Bush first term, a broad picture of US relations with the individual rogue states will be developed alongside analysis of the overall utility of the rogue state concept. Through extensive analysis of government public diplomacy, declassified material and elite interviews, it will consider why America targeted rogue states and explore the rationale and articulation of the policies formulated to deal with their perceived threat. The degree to which the worldview and ‘vision’ of the Clinton and Bush administrations was influenced by the rogue state threat will be explored and the factors impacting upon their ability to implement their chosen strategies will be discussed. Crucial in understanding the latter is an appreciation of the influence of domestic political forces, namely Congress and pressure groups, on the shaping of US policy towards rogue states. Finally, the book will consider how America’s approach to rogue states evolved in the post-Cold War and post-9/11 eras, placing America’s stance towards nations such as Iraq and Iran within the wider narrative of US foreign relations during this period.

The primary focus of the book is upon the US dimension of the rogue states issue. Although there is discussion of alternative approaches for dealing with the rogue states, centering particularly on Europe’s critical dialogue with Iran and opposition to punitive US sanctions, the evaluation of such strategies is not a fundamental objective of this work. Similarly, by necessity there is discussion of the actions, motivation and policies of the rogue states themselves, but these do not receive equal attention as it is America’s reaction to such behaviour that is being studied. Further, and covered in detail by international relations scholars, the work does not seek to address theoretical concerns about the role of rogue states in the international arena, nor devise any overarching strategy for US relations with the nations concerned. Instead, it will offer conclusions on the impulses behind, and actors involved in, the formulation, articulation and implementation of America’s rogue states policy over an eleven year period.

Targeting rogue states

Why the focus on rogue states? What made them so deserving of US attention during the Clinton and Bush years? The simplest, but by no means least convincing, explanation might point to the fact that the US and the rogues ‘had history’. Ingrained hostility and misperceptions that had built up over time factored into the listing of the countries concerned as rogue states, with an intelligence void often leading to superficial and false assumptions which shaped interpretations of their behaviour.¹ US prestige and regional goals were damaged by both the Castro revolution in Cuba in 1959, and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979 which led to the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran. The legacy of the 1950 to 1953 Korean War still actively haunted US relations with the communist regime of North Korea, while Libya’s engagement in state-sponsored terrorism in the 1980s had singled it out for military action by President Reagan. Libya’s involvement in the 1989 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, which was linked to its intelligence service, served as a catalyst for the emergence of domestic lobby groups that pressured Congress and the Executive into following punitive policies towards rogue states. Similar groups also influenced policy towards Cuba and Iran, attaching a high domestic political cost to non-coercive policies and increasing the likelihood of sterile and useless conflicts continuing.² Iraq, which had enjoyed varying degrees of US support in the 1980s due to its role as a regional counterweight to Iran, ensured its place on the rogue list following its invasion of Kuwait in 1990, an act that led to war with a US-led coalition force. The controversial decision to leave Saddam in office, which was driven by a desire to stay within the UN remit and avoid creating a power vacuum that would benefit Iran, ensured that the Iraqi leader became the personification of a rogue leader throughout the 1990s.

Looking beyond America’s antagonistic relationship with the rogues, it is evident that the nations on the list were engaged in activities that posed a threat to US national security and the interests of key regional allies such as South Korea, Japan and Israel. The rogue states were central to a post-Cold War national security agenda, which focused on nuclear and WMD proliferation and the potential for the export of such materials and ‘know how’ to other countries and non-state terrorist groups. Fears about the destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons had, of course, been a key characteristic of the Cold War. However, the notion of mutually-assured destruction provided some strategic reassurance during the superpower rivalry, and as the Cold War ended there were obvious opportunities to reduce, and indeed eliminate, the huge arsenal of devices held by the US and the former Soviet Union. Yet policymakers grew increasingly concerned about accounting for, and securing, nuclear material in the old Soviet bloc and ensuring that expertise and knowledge did not fall into the hands of regimes with ‘proven records of aggression and terrorism’.³ American policy-makers focused on renegade rulers who had a track record of terrorism and aspired to develop a nuclear capacity to augment their growing arsenals of advanced weaponry. Unchecked by the crumbling ties of superpower patronage, there was particular concern about North Korea’s ambiguous nuclear programme and ballistic missile development, while US analysts debated Iran’s nuclear intentions, prepared to think the worst as Tehran was linked with a series of terrorist attacks in the early 1990s against Israeli and Kurdish groups. The focus on WMD proliferation rose to the top of the national security agenda in the wake of the first Gulf War. Iraq’s use of chemical weapons in the 1980s against Iran, its invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent discovery of Saddam’s plans for a nuclear bomb left US officials considering a new calculus of post-Cold War threat and determined, in the words of then defense secretary Dick Cheney, to prepare to deter and combat the ‘Iraqs of the future’. Such thinking informed military planning and ensured, as Michael Klare notes, that any ‘peace dividend’ at the end of the Cold War was sacrificed for the maintenance of a high military budget to combat rogue states.⁴ It is clear that the rogue states’ track record of destabilising conduct and involvement in terrorism channelled American fears about their capacity for trouble and, aided by worst-case intelligence calculations, led them to become a key focus of post-Cold War US foreign policy.

Further explanation for the targeting of the rogue states can be deduced from an understanding of America’s traditional tendency to demonise threats to national security as a means to mobilise public support for chosen policies and goals. As Clinton’s former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake described, ‘most of the rhetoric that rallies the American public is absolutist in nature’,⁵ with America’s participation in the international system being driven by what historian David Ryan has labelled as a notion of ‘barbarians at the gate’.⁶ The ‘linkage of diverse badness to a single source’,⁷ as seen in the grouping together of the politically, geographically and ideologically disparate rogue states who were not in a meaningful alliance with one another, can be an effective political tactic, but it increases the tendency for worst-case scenario thinking and can become an ‘analytical cul de sac, that prevents, rather than encourages understanding’.⁸ The rogue states were described as being in opposition to core US beliefs, constituting a menace to the ‘universal’ values of freedom and democracy. America’s benign ambition, and purity of purpose, was juxtaposed with the rogue states’ destructiveness and recalcitrant ambition to disturb the peaceful status quo of the international community. Recourse to such language is often heightened in times of self-doubt or periods of uncertainty about the US role on the international stage, as evidenced in the early Cold War years and both before and after 9/11. Underpinning these calls for action is the idea of American exceptionalism and a narrative centred on the nation’s special responsibility for, and indeed burden of, global leadership. The idea serves as a mechanism to maintain, in Siobhan McEvoy-Levy’s words, ‘public eulogies sympathetic to the exercise of power abroad’⁹ and, despite the problematic nature of quantifying American uniqueness,¹⁰ it works because Americans generally believe in such rhetoric.¹¹

Along with other key phrases and themes such as ‘bound to lead’ and ‘city on a hill’, the notion of US exceptionalism can be viewed as an operating framework, or prism, through which policy is communicated and activism justified, and defended, on the international stage. The Cold War had been ‘won’ in the early 1990s, but instead of euphoria there emerged a nagging sense of unease about the grounds for and purpose of continued US global leadership. The absence of an ideological threat seemed to suggest an absence of purpose, as the US was ‘without any clear “other” against which to define itself’.¹² Into such a void materialised the rogue states. The Clinton administration consistently portrayed the rogue states as being on the ‘wrong side of history’ and assaulting the ‘basic values’ of the international community.¹³ The rogue states required tackling because of the threat they posed to the ‘democratic family of nations’, and it was America’s calling to remain engaged on the international scene in order for ‘the tide of history to keep running our way’.¹⁴

Although the rogue states, as a collective entity, could not replicate the powerful mobilising and organising force of Soviet communism, their threat was still utilised by the Clinton administration in order to promote a series of policies focused on WMD proliferation and to demonstrate that America was ‘bound to lead’ and unable to countenance any retreat from international affairs. Such rhetoric reached its peak after 9/11, as the Bush administration framed the terrorist atrocities, and subsequent need to tackle the ‘axis of evil’, within a narrative of ‘the nation’s distinctive destiny and global role’.¹⁵ The public diplomacy, worldviews and policy prescriptions of the Clinton and Bush administrations will be looked at in much greater detail, but in terms of their ‘vision’ of America it is clear that Bush was more prone to accept and expound the exceptionalist line. All Presidents have to invoke a sense of the nation’s uniqueness – to do otherwise would be distinctly un- American – but for Clinton it was more clearly a mobilising tactic, rather than an organising principle. This was not the case for the post-1994 Republican Party nor Bush himself, for whom US exceptionalism was an accepted fact, a position that led to a strong sense of moral certainty and an ideological opposition to rogue states that influenced the policy process.

While the above factors all shaped the decision to target the rogue states, the driving force behind the doctrine was arguably the commitment of Clinton and Bush to maintaining US global leadership and pre-eminence in a changed post-Cold War environment. The pursuit of ongoing hegemony required a willingness to focus military and diplomatic power on areas of the world vital to US national security and economic prosperity. The rogue states, who resided in these regions of importance, were perceived as a clear obstacle to American hegemony. This thinking was conceptualised in the leaked 1992 Defense Planning Guidance document which, although rewritten and softened on its formal release a year later, declared that America’s primary objective should be to ‘prevent any hostile power from dominating a regions whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power’. While the report discussed the potential for Cuba to cause instability in Latin America and launch a ‘military provocation against the US or an American ally’, it was clear that Iran and Iraq in the Middle East, and North Korea in East Asia, were uppermost in policymakers’ minds. It was deemed essential that the US ‘maintain our status as a military power of first magnitude’ and ‘prevent emergence of a vacuum or a regional hegemon’ in those regions.¹⁶ The rogue states pursuit of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons was, through the prism of the defense planning document, a clear effort to change the regional status quo and deter America from intervening in regions of vital interest.

President Clinton, and the subsequent George W. Bush administration, accepted the above characterisation of the rogue state threat and the goal of maintaining US global hegemony. However, as will become clear, tensions emerged over the means for maintaining US pre-eminence and the tactics that should be adopted in order to manage the behaviour of leaders such as Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il. In short, the Clinton administration was largely committed to consensual hegemony, involving multilateralism and co-operation with international partners, which saw it expend considerable effort on maintaining UN sanctions against Iraq and attempting to secure multilateral sanctions against Iran. The rogue states were deemed to be containable and, indeed, capable of rehabilitation, with the US approach framed within the promotion of democracy and the protection of the international community. However, domestically Clinton faced pressure from right-wing elements of the Republican Party who were committed to a different form of US hegemony: one that captured the uni-polar moment and reflected America’s ability to act alone, free of ‘constraining’ international agreements and norms. Clinton was pushed by the post-1994 Republican Congress to increase unilateral sanctions against Cuba, Libya and Iran, a move which brought the US into opposition with many of its allies. Further, far from believing in the rehabilitation of rogue states, the Republicans increasingly saw regime change as the only means of stopping undeterrable rogue states, attacking negotiations with Iran and North Korea as appeasement. NMD became a Republican priority, with Clinton pressured into accepting the development of a system that was seen as essential to both protect America and prevent nuclear blackmail from regional hegemons. While Clinton fought to maintain control of his chosen rogue state strategy, one that focused on containment and sporadic engagement and negotiations, the George W. Bush administration embraced the growing regime change agenda more openly, culminating in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The following work will explore the above tensions as it builds a detailed picture of the development of US policy towards the rogue states during the post-Cold War and post-9/11 eras.

Book approach

The starting point for the work is the assertion that it is possible, in abstract, to discern four stages of the US approach towards rogue states since the end of the Cold War. At each stage a political transition or major event occurred to suggest the potential for a shift in US policy towards rogue states. Two of these shifts are concerned with the moment a new administration took office: Clinton in 1993 and Bush in 2001. The remaining stages are concerned with the Republican take-over of Congress in 1994, which represented a major challenge to Clinton’s control of the domestic and foreign policy agenda, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which were deemed by many academics to signal a watershed and revolutionary moment in the course of US foreign relations. Through a detailed examination of these four episodes it will be possible to identify the continuity and change that occurred between the Clinton and Bush approaches.

By focusing on the development of the rogue states policy, and consider...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The foundations of the rogue state doctrine
• 3 The Clinton Administration and the application of rogue state doctrine (1993–1995)
• 4 Clinton, Congress and the struggle for control of the rogue states doctrine (1995–2000)
• 5 George W. Bush, the Republicans and rogue states (2000–2001)
• 6 George W. Bush, the ‘axis of evil’ and rogue states regime change (2001–2004)
• 7 Conclusion: America and the rogue states
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index