Abstract
A small crowd gathered in Baghdad’s Firdos Square as US military forces overran Iraq’s violent and chaotic capital.1 Passersby took turns smashing a sledgehammer into Saddam Hussein’s statue to no avail. The bronze likeness stood immune to the puny assaults by the Baghdadis. With its right arm raised up as if saluting the future, the hubristic statue built by Hussein to himself defied its would-be destroyers. It was left to the invading military forces to bring down this emblem of the Iraqi dictatorship.
The risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.
—Madeleine Albright
It is better to be feared than loved.
—Niccolò Machiavelli
Who is going to bell the cat?
—Aesop
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Notes
Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 390–433.
For an article critical of the media’s handling of the statue’s collapse, see Peer Maass, “The Toppling,” New Yorker, January 10, 2011, pp. 25–31 and 54.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 408.
Ernst Badian, Foreign Clientelae, 264–70 B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 281.
Richard B. Barker, Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004), 145–47; and
Joseph Wheelan, Jefferson’s War: America’s First War on Terror, 1801–1805 (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2003), 350–66.
Jim Michaels, “Pirates’ New Tactics Make Navies’ Job Harder,” USA Today, January 7, 2011, p. 6.
Adrian Tinniswood, Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests, and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010), 210–27 and 233–43.
E. G. Chapulina, “The Barbary Corsairs” Blackwood’s 328, no. 1982 (December 1980): 483–89.
Simon Smith, “Piracy in Early British America,” History Today 46, no. 5 (May 1996): 30–33.
For greater treatment of early rogues, see Thomas H. Henriksen, “The Rise and Decline of Rogue States,” Journal of International Affairs 54, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 349–73.
Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 277.
Thomas Erdbrink and Joby Warrick, “Iran Derides Sanctions, Talks of Reducing Cooperation with Inspectors,” Washington Post, June 11, 2010, A8.
James Adams, The Unnatural Alliance: Israel and South Africa (London: Quartet Books, 1984), 187–96; and
Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1991), 271.
Mitchell Reiss, Bridled Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their Nuclear Capabilities (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995), 32.
Yevgeny Primakov, Russia and the Arabs: Behind the Scenes in the Middle East from the Cold War to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 57–72.
Thomas H. Henriksen, American Power after the Berlin Wall (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 210–12.
John Marcum, The Angolan Revolution: Volume II, Exile Politics and Guerrilla Warfare, 1962–1976 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 275.
Sheldon M. Stern, Averting “The Final Failure” (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 388.
Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 160.
Christopher C. Harmon, Terrorism Today (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 13.
Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want (New York: Random House, 2006), 23–37.
George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 320.
The sheriff analogy is that of Richard N. Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States after the Cold War (New York: Council of Foreign Relations, 1997), 6.
For an excellent study of movements of rage, see Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 275–77.
Thomas L. Friedman, “Clinton’s Security Aide Gives a Vision for Foreign Policy,” New York Times, September 22, 1993, A18.
Bill Clinton, “Remarks to Future Leaders of Europe in Brussels, January 9, 1994,” in Public Papers of Presidents, William J. Clinton, Volume I (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1994), 11.
Christopher Marquis, “U.S. Declares ‘Rogue Nations’ Are Now ‘States of Concern,’” New York Times, June 20, 2000, A1.
Anthony Lake, “Confronting Backlash States,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (March/April 1994): 45–46.
For more on this view, see James Mann, “N. Korean Missiles Have Russian Roots, Explosive Theory Suggests,” Los Angeles Times, September 6, 2000, A1.
David Albright, Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America’s Enemies (New York: Free Press, 2010), 15–26.
Bill Gertz, “Chinese Companies Sent Missile Parts to N. Korea,” Washington Times, July 20, 1999, A1.
“Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies,” cited in Barbara Slavin, “Missile Program Holds Key to N. Korea’s Foreign Relations,” USA Today, November 6, 2000, p. 1.
Joby Warrick, “Iran Close to Nuclear Capability, IAEA Says,” Washington Post, November 7, 2011, A1.
Many front-rank theorists slight the role of rogue players in international affairs. See John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Powers Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001);
Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1973);
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Company, 1979); and
Robert J. Art and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Use of Force: Military Power and International Politics, 7th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).
For a description of this argument, see Robert S. Litwak, Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy: Containment after the Cold War (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000), xiv.
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© 2012 Thomas H. Henriksen
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Henriksen, T.H. (2012). The Rogue Phenomenon. In: America and the Rogue States. American Foreign Policy in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137006400_2
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