Regime Change 2.0

One man’s dictator is another’s indispensable partner in the “global war on terrorism.” The competition between contradictory values and objectives—on the one hand, President Bush’s Wilson-on-steroids rhetoric about “ending tyranny”; on the other, the ugly accommodations Washington has made with the “world’s worst” for the sake of counterterrorism and oil—has naturally fueled charges of hypocrisy. There may be no resolving this traditional tension in American foreign policy between ideals and interests, but the tension can be managed.

The roots of the current debate can be traced to an important conceptual shift that occurred around 1980. Before then, the terms “rogue,” “pariah,” and “outlaw” were used interchangeably to describe states whose repressive ruling regimes engaged in the most extreme violations of international norms governing the treatment of civilian populations; notorious examples were Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Idi Amin’s Uganda. After 1980, the focus shifted from the internal behavior of a state (how a regime treats its own people) to its external behavior (how it relates to other states in the international system). Two key criteria marked a state as “rogue”: the sponsorship of terrorism and the pursuit of WMD. In accordance with the shift to a concern with states’ external behavior, the State Department inaugurated an official listing of countries employing terrorism as an instrument of policy.

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Over the years, the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism has been subject to politicization.

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…the Clinton administration’s translation of rogue state rhetoric into strategy exposed major liabilities of the term. The pejorative label was an American political rubric without standing in international law. And because it was analytically soft and quintessentially political, it was applied selectively and inconsistently… Another important reason that the term was so elastic was its focus solely on objectionable external behavior.

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The translation of the rogue state concept into policy sharply limited strategic flexibility. The assertion that these countries constituted a distinct class of states pushed policy-makers toward adopting a one-size-fits-all strategy of comprehensive containment and isolation. Once a country was relegated to the “rogue” or “outlaw” category, critics viewed any deviation from hard-line containment and isolation as tantamount to appeasement. The rogue state strategy proved more an attitude than a coherent guide to policy. Concluding that the category had become a political straitjacket, in 2000 the Clinton administration jettisoned the term “rogue state” in favor of the infelicitous “states of concern.” But the incoming George W. Bush administration pointedly restored it to the U.S. foreign-policy lexicon in accordance with what observers called its “ABC”—”anything but Clinton”—stance.

Al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on 9/11 recast the American debate on rogue states. Bush administration officials argued that the threats to the United States in this new era were inextricably linked to the character of its adversaries—undeterrable terrorist groups and unpredictable rogue states. Accordingly, administration hard-liners insisted that merely changing the behavior of these states would no longer suffice because the bad behavior derived from their very nature… This redefinition of the threat led to a radical change in U.S. strategy. Viewing Iraq through “the prism of 9/11,” in then–secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase, the administration made the decisive shift from a pre-9/11 strategy of containing regimes to a new strategy of undoing them.

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Political scientist John Ikenberry has argued persuasively that the key to America’s international success during the Cold War was the embedding of U.S. power in international security and economic institutions, such as NATO and the World Bank. That made the exercise of American power more legitimate and less threatening to other states and fostered the perception of the United States as a benign super-power, even as it advanced American national interests. It also explains why the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the bipolar Cold War system did not trigger the rise of a coalition of states to balance American power.

But as historian John Lewis Gaddis observes, “The rush to war in Iraq in the absence of a ‘first shot’ or ‘smoking gun’ left . . . a growing sense throughout the world there could be nothing worse than American hegemony if it was to be used in this way.” The perception of the United States as a rogue superpower, which had arrogated an unfettered right of military preemption, unleashed a diplomatic effort by France, Germany, and Russia to block the use of force against Iraq by withholding the legitimizing imprimatur of the United Nations.

At the heart of the dispute was the cardinal principle of sovereignty. President George H. W. Bush faced a far easier task building an international coalition for a showdown with Iraq in 1991 than his son did 12 years later. In the first gulf war, Security Council authorization and the forging of a broad multinational coalition to liberate Kuwait were diplomatically possible because Saddam Hussein had violated a universally supported international norm: State sovereignty is to be protected from external aggression. By contrast, in the bitter 2003 UN debate, the attainment of Security Council approval for military action was bound to rouse strong opposition rooted in that same international norm: Compelling Iraqi WMD disarmament through an externally imposed regime change would be a precedent-setting negation of state sovereignty.

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Historically, the periods of greatest turmoil in the modern era have arisen from the emergence of expansionist great powers with unbounded ambition, such as Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, seeking the wholesale transformation of the international order. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the defining feature of contemporary international relations has been the absence of competition among the great powers that might bring with it the risk of major war. Although China’s meteoric rise and Russia’s uncertain political trajectory have prompted balance-of-power realists to question the long-term durability of this current condition, neither great power is mounting a frontal assault on the existing international order.

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Operating beyond the bounds of international order are a diverse group of weak, isolated countries—ranging from Burma to Zimbabwe, and Belarus to North Korea—that defy global norms of behavior but do not threaten the stability of the entire system. How can these states be induced or compelled to comply with international norms? Through targeted strategies that create effective influence on their ruling regimes. The aim is to present each with a structured choice between the rewards of behavior change and the penalties for non-compliance.

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GLOBALIZATION—THE DRIVING FORCE OF THE WORLD ECONOMY—is a double-edged sword. Reintegration, especially for an oil-exporting state such as Libya, offers tangible benefits. But opening up their countries and engaging in the global economy also carries for these beleaguered regimes the risk of political contagion that might threaten their survival. Dictators such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Il realize that a soft landing for their society would likely mean a hard landing for their regime. Since autarky is not a viable long-term alternative to integration, their strategy is essentially to muddle through, gaining the benefits of outside economic links while attempting to insulate themselves from the political consequences.

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In offering a structured choice to these regimes, the United States must be prepared to take “yes” for an answer when one of them changes its behavior.

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The promotion of a rules-based international order also requires that the United States not turn a blind eye to non-democratic allies, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that are not pariahs along the lines of Burma and Zimbabwe but that also flout important international norms. To avoid charges of hypocrisy and double standards where competing foreign-policy interests are at stake, the United States must be willing to set a minimum bar for compliance by its allies and to pay the price when nations do not comply. Easier said than done, but that is the task facing U.S. policymakers.