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A rogue state is a government which, in the view of the United States, does not abide by international norms of civilized behavior. The term rogue state did
not gain wide coinage, due to utter lack of consensus as to America's right to judge other nations' conduct.
Rogue states are almost always ruled by authoritarian regimes that severely restrict what those in the West would regard as
basic human freedoms. They are generally hostile to the West and its allies like Japan
and South Korea in the East, and are often accused of sponsoring terrorism or of seeking to acquire or develop weapons of mass destruction.
These are countries which:
- brutalize their own people and squander their national resources for the personal gain of the rulers
- display no regard for international law, threaten their neighbors, and callously violate international treaties to which they
are party
- are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction, along with other advanced military technology, to be used as threats
or offensively to achieve the aggressive designs of these regimes
- sponsor terrorism around the globe
- are irrational to the extent that conventional methods of negotiation are ineffective
- reject basic human values
The U.S. has used the threat posed by rogue states to the security of other countries to justify its foreign policy and other
initiatives: for example, renewed interest in and funding of anti-ballistic missiles programs in the U.S. are, according to the most prominent public statements
of U.S. officials, grounded in the concern that a rogue state may direct weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. and not be deterred by the certainty of
retaliation. North Korea and Iraq have
been suggested as "rogue states", along with Iran, Syria, and Libya.
In the last 6 months of the Clinton administration, the term "rogue
state" was temporarily replaced with the term "state of concern", however the Bush administration has never used that term.
Since the September 11, 2001
World Trade Center attack, the term rogue state has been
supplemented in the United States by the term "axis of evil", adopted
(January 29, 2002) by President George W. Bush in reference to Iraq,
Iran and North Korea.
Some critics charge that "rogue state" merely means any state that opposes the U.S. Others accuse the U.S. of being a rogue
state itself, whose foreign policy is sometimes accused of having the sort of brutality and capriciousness of those it considers
"rogue states". The book Rogue Nation claims that the U.S. is as
much of a "rogue state" as any other, even by its own standards.
Several critics have applied this epithet to the United States for its "unilateralism", because of its record of opting out of major international treaties such as The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, The International
Convention on the Rights of
the Child, the International Criminal
Court and the Kyoto Protocol on the Environment (though it must be
noted that for all these the US has either opted out according to provisions of the treaty, or refused to ratify/sign
altogether), or its support for armed action against governments it dislikes such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
See also: failed state
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