Us Foreign Policy and the Rogue State Doctrine by Alex Miles

Author:Alex Miles [Miles, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780415679749
Google: KgY-YsrAZz0C
Goodreads: 13715483
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

The purpose of this chapter was to analyse how a change in administration affected US policy towards the rogue states. With the Republicans taking control of the White House after eight years of Democratic control there was an expectation that a more hard-line strategy towards Iraq, North Korea, Iran and the other ‘problem’ states would emerge. There was, as this chapter showed, much evidence to support such assumptions, as debates in Republican circles in the 1990s increasingly focused on regime change in Iraq and the more assertive application of US power against states deemed hostile to America’s national security. The involvement of key Bush officials in the Congressional Advisory Board and the PNAC organisation was important in shaping the new administration’s outlook on the rogue states threat, alongside other foreign policy issues such as the utility of international agreements and the pressing need for NMD. The work of these groups permeated the Bush campaign for 2000 and led to the rogue states being identified as a central challenge to American hegemony and regional goals in the post-Cold War era.

When in office, there were indications that Bush was following a different path towards the rogues, conceptualising the threat they posed on the basis of a reading of their ‘character’ and his own ‘gut instincts’ about the nature of their rulers. It was clear that the new administration did not trust rogue states sufficiently to enter into negotiations with them, and Bush distanced himself from attempts to broker a settlement with North Korea over their production and trade in ballistic missiles. In addition, the focus on the character of the rogue states left the administration declaring them to be undeterrable and liable to resort to blackmail, or attacks against the US, if they developed WMD. As a consequence of this reading of rogue states the key focus of the Bush administration’s national security strategy pre-9/11 was on developing NMD to combat the threat these nations posed.

However, it is arguable that the expectation of change was, in actual fact, just that, and while there were small differences in style and content the Bush administration followed a broadly similar approach towards the rogue states as that of Clinton. While the Bush White House showed a much greater commitment to NMD than the Clinton administration had done, the underlying rationale for the defensive shield was the same and the depiction of ‘crazy’ states determined to attack the US was a feature of both presidents’ rhetoric on the issue. Further, there was an embrace of Clinton’s evocation of borderless threats, and the sense that the US was required to promote democracy by tackling nations who remained on the ‘wrong side of history’. Bush may have come in to office with ideas of a hard-line strategy against Saddam Hussein but, short of token military action and the allocation of funds for Iraqi opposition groups, in the pre-9/11 environment it remained difficult to devise the means to accelerate Saddam’s removal from power. It was a similar story with

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