Abstract
This article examines how the foundations of the ‘rogue states’ security narrative in the United States developed prior to the declaration of the George W. Bush administration’s ‘Global War on Terror’ and President Bush’s representation of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil’. The article argues that the puzzle of how US post-Cold War foreign and defence policy came to be focused on ‘irrational’ — but militarily inferior — adversaries can be understood through analysing how actors within the US defence community discursively constructed discrete international crises as the trigger for a major shift in US threat scenarios. This is developed through an examination of two crucial episodes in the construction of post-Cold War US national security interests: the crisis in the Persian Gulf in 1990–1 and the North Korean nuclear crisis in 1993–4. The article suggests the importance of historicizing contests over the interpretation of international crises in order to both better understand the process through which a country’s national security interests are defined and to gain greater analytical purchase on how security narratives are reconstructed during processes of systemic change.
Highlights
Following the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001, the potential international security threats that deviant regimes present — and America’s military response — have become the central focus of US defence policymaking and have attracted sustained attention from international security scholars
The central argument presented in this article is that the foundations of the contemporary US preoccupation with the problem of rogue states were formed in the elite political contests over competing narratives to define the nature of the post-Cold War era that occurred within the US defence policy community from the late 1980s onwards, long before US military engagement with ‘rogue states’ gained greater acceptance from the American public during the George W
Bush presidency the US preoccupation with the potential security threat posed by militarily inferior rogue states reached new heights, and has continued to shape the defence policy agenda pursued by the Obama administration
Summary
Following the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001, the potential international security threats that deviant regimes present — and America’s military response — have become the central focus of US defence policymaking and have attracted sustained attention from international security scholars (see, for example, Lennon and Eiss, 2004). The central argument presented in this article is that the foundations of the contemporary US preoccupation with the problem of rogue states were formed in the elite political contests over competing narratives to define the nature of the post-Cold War era that occurred within the US defence policy community from the late 1980s onwards, long before US military engagement with ‘rogue states’ gained greater acceptance from the American public during the George W. The article concludes that while ‘rogue states’ may constitute a very real and salient threat to US national security interests, the construction of a new security narrative after the end of the Cold War, whereby a group of Third World countries were identified as the most immediate and critical threat to the security of the world’s sole remaining superpower, was the result of a politically-driven discursive process that helped to preserve important elements of the status quo in US defence policy. This article provides a comprehensive account of the emergence of rogue states as the principal threat to US national security and highlights the active role played by US defence policymakers in the evolution of the ‘rogue states’ security narrative
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