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SAIS Review 21.2 (2001) 241-245



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Book Review

The United States as "Rogue Superpower"

Anton Ware


Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs, by Noam Chomsky. Cambridge: South End Press, 2000. 252 pp. $16.

In June 2000, the U.S. Department of State announced that it was dropping the term "rogue state" from its official vocabulary, opting instead to use the less antagonistic label "state of concern" to refer to those nations--typically Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Cuba-that have been accused of sponsoring terrorism and otherwise refusing to conform to international norms. Many observers welcomed the "states of concern" terminology, despite its awkwardness, as a sign of new flexibility in the U.S. approach to countries like North Korea, whose "rogue leader" Kim Jong Il had recently signaled a willingness to engage in constructive dialogue with other members of the international community. One significant aspect of the change in terminology that failed to gain the attention of most commentators was that the new language revealed the highly subjective nature of the underlying concept. That is to say, whereas the determination of "rogue state" status would seem to necessitate the existence of some objective criteria, for example the extent to which the state in question has complied with international law, the term "state of concern" clearly implies a subjective evaluation--that is, a determination that the state in question is of concern to the United States. U.S. State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher made this clear when he explained that "states of concern...continue to be of concern because they are not willing to deal with some of the issues we [the United States] are concerned about." 1 Thus the new language [End Page 241] makes explicit an important yet rarely articulated aspect of the concept of rogue nations, namely that the will of the United States has always been the implicit yardstick by which the behavior of so-called "rogue states" has been measured.

Notwithstanding its official replacement, the rogue nation concept continues to inform foreign policy decision-making in the United States, as evidenced in recent academic and policy debates over the issue of missile defense. Indeed, considering the central place this concept occupies in contemporary foreign policy discourse, there is a surprising dearth of critical commentary in the international relations literature on its meaning and role. In Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs, Noam Chomsky, the eminent linguist and critic of U.S. foreign policy from MIT, fills this void with an insightful and thought-provoking look at the lawless and hypocritical behavior of the world's remaining superpower. Rogue States is a compilation of several recent essays and lectures by Chomsky, covering a broad range of topics all revolving around the idea that the United States should be held accountable for its actions and measured by its own professed standards. These are not new topics for Chomsky, but rather new thoughts that in some cases read like updated versions of his earlier broadsides against U.S. hypocrisy, including Deterring Democracy (1992), and The New Military Humanism: Lessons From Kosovo (1999).

Chomsky begins Rogue States by noting that the term "rogue state" has two possible usages: "a propagandistic use, applied to assorted enemies, and a literal use that applies to states that do not regard themselves as bound by international norms." In the propagandistic sense, "rogue states" are one part of a trio of "new threats from abroad" (joining international terrorism and Latin American narcotraffickers) that necessitate continued direct U.S. military engagement across the globe, even after the old threat of the "evil empire" has long disappeared. In the narrow, literal sense of the term, no nation, according to Chomsky, meets the rogue state criteria better than the United States--a veritable "rogue superpower." In fact, the United States regularly acknowledges, in what Chomsky terms the "rogue state doctrine" of U.S. foreign policy, that it does not consider itself bound by international law and other "utopian, legalistic means like...the United Nations" (in former Secretary of State George Shultz's words...

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