The Politics of Dismantling Containment

During the 2000 presidential election campaign, neither Vice President Al Gore nor Governor George W. Bush had many encouraging words for those countries interested in shedding their pariah status and moving toward more cordial relations with the United States. Although touting the need to build more constructive relationships with former enemies, Gore's "forward engagement" concept justified engaging Russia and China, rather than advocated improving relations with the likes of Cuba or Iran. Bush's campaign promised to remain tough on Cuba and to terminate the Clinton administration's policy of unilateral gestures to Iran. Both candidates vowed to maintain sanctions on Iraq, press for the ouster of Saddam Hussein, and protect the United States from the attacks of "rogue" countries.

This sort of election rhetoric was not surprising, given that pledging to improve relations with countries and regimes long vilified by U.S. leaders was sure to lose a candidate votes rather than gain him support. Yet, it would be wrong to conclude that these statements represent a U.S. consensus to continue policies of punishment toward countries with which the United States has had disagreements. To assume that North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and Iraq will remain on the periphery of international respectability as long as the United States is involved in demarcating those boundaries would also be inaccurate. If the election is no reliable barometer of the policy that the new administration and Congress might pursue toward such countries, what might be a more realistic assessment of what is to come? What are the prospects for a new approach that incorporates not only sanctions, but also incentives, in seeking to change the behavior of countries?

Reconsidering Past Approaches

The new administration and the new Congress will begin the challenge of evaluating and crafting U.S. policy toward North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and Iraq in a dramatically different climate than the one their executive and legislative predecessors faced four years ago. In 1996, U.S. policy toward these states was defined by the notion that they were "rogue" countries dedicated to challenging internationally accepted standards of conduct and unable to engage with the outside world in any constructive way. Judged to support terrorism, pursue weapons of mass destruction, persecute their own populations, and malign the United States, they were considered to be among the greatest threats to U.S. national security.

Based on this assessment, first articulated by then-National Security Adviser Anthony Lake in 1994, ¹ policy prescriptions for such states were straightforward: Economic sanctions coupled with other punitive policies were the only sensible options to deal with countries that policymakers had presented to the public as incapable of rehabilitation. Limited sanctions--such as those on Iran--evolved into comprehensive ones. Cuba, Libya, and Iran, once subject to full U.S. unilateral sanctions, became the target of congressionally inspired "secondary" sanctions, mandating penalties on foreign companies seeking to invest there. The United States toughened its Iraq policy by declaring that multilateral sanctions would persist--and Iraq would continue to chafe under bombings--until Saddam was removed from power. U.S. policy toward North Korea was the only case to escape this trend as the United States moved away from the brink of confrontation with Pyongyang to engagement with it.

As the prominence of missile defense in today's foreign policy discussions reveals, this disparate group of countries is still seen as a looming threat to U.S. interests and security. Many U.S. actors believe the threats posed by these countries are so significant that they warrant spending billions of dollars and running the risk of exacerbating U.S. relations with Russia, China, and even Europe in order to build a missile defense system to counter them. Nevertheless, widespread agreement no longer exists about what types of strategies should be pursued toward these countries. In contrast to the moral certitude and relative policy clarity of just a few years ago, the new administration and Congress will step into a foreign...