Securitization of North Korea as an irrational produces an unstable global system and props up American militarism abroad

Finally, the introduction and consolidation of the rogue states narrative enabled the return of a familiar concept in US defence policy: containment. As discussed earlier, the concept of containment implies a real threat from an aggressive enemy that must be restrained, if necessary by military force, and establishes a link with the interpretive framework that guided Cold War defence planning. Indeed, as Roland Bleiker (2003: 721) has observed, ‘[t]he rhetoric of rogue states is indicative of how US foreign policy continues to be driven by dualistic and military Cold War thinking patterns’ (see also Smith, 2000). Yet how actors draw lessons from the past — and how they apply these lessons in the present — is shaped ‘less by history than by the frames applied to that history’ (Levitt and March, 1988: 324). This is important because the discursive construction of a link between contemporary security challenges and historical ‘lessons’ helps to orient policy solutions to new security threats in a familiar direction. Moreover, because terms like ‘containment’ retain a strong political resonance in America that elides the contextual differences between the present and the past, they frame and limit political debates on the use of US force by representing contemporary security challenges and the ‘evils’ of the past as equivalent (see Homolar-Riechmann, 2009). The construction of an overarching security narrative that located the principal threat to US national security in the behaviour of rogue states built upon the three primary components discussed earlier: human rights violations, international terrorism and the pursuit and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Of these three components, the latter two were usually given the most prominence during the 1990s (cf. Tanter, 1999; Litwak, 2000). Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, while the connection between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction was significant for the development of the rogue states narrative, it is the oppressive nature of a regime that has provided the rationale for US policymakers to include the first and second main components of the US rogue states concept under a single umbrella term. In particular, this enabled the interpretation by key actors in US defence policymaking after the end of the Cold War that rogue states’ disregard for the fate of their own populations constituted a threat to the US and a risk to the stability of the international system. This interpretation of rogue states’ intentions is based on the assumption that a regime that severely restricts and violates civil liberties — and exhibits a willingness to commit ruthless crimes against its own population — has less interest in avoiding human casualties in the conduct of its foreign policy, and is not simply the consequence of the violation of international human rights norms. Combined with the high degree of domestic control that the leadership of a ‘rogue state’ arguably enjoys over its own society, this apparent indifference to the domestic consequences of its actions in the international arena is believed to grant an oppressive regime greater freedom of action in its foreign policy conduct. This assumption about rogue states’ internal behaviour has provided the main rationale for how their international behaviour is interpreted, which key actors in US defence policymaking after the end of the Cold War have used to portray rogue states as constituting the chief threat to US national security and the main source of uncertainty in the international system. Because they violate human rights norms, rogue states are assumed to act outside the standards of ‘civilized’ international society and international law. Moreover, because the loss of civilian lives is not considered to be a dominant feature in their strategic calculations, rogue states are assumed to be insensitive to traditional instruments of statecraft to influence a country’s foreign policy, such as economic sanctions or the threat of military retaliation. By definition, rogue states are ‘undeterrable’. As a result, such regimes are believed to be inherently ‘unpredictable’ — and may therefore behave ‘irrationally’ in the international arena. This series of assumptions about deviant regimes has constituted a new overarching security narrative that became widely shared among US defense policymakers in the aftermath of the Cold War, and which has enabled a diverse range of US adversaries to be discursively represented as posing a common threat to US national security interests. Ironically, while rogue states’ assumed irrationality has served to justify the US preoccupation with ballistic missile defence and military planning for ‘uncertainty’, the core of US security policy towards rogue states emphasizes both containment and deterrence as key to counter the threat posed by these deviant regimes (cf. Lake, 1994). Furthermore, although US involvement in peacekeeping operations — including Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti and Kosovo — were the prevalent US military engagements during the 1990s, the US defence community regarded these uses of US military force as mere ‘irregularities’ and refrained from major revisions to both the US defence architecture and contingency plans. As a result, a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the structure, equipment and scenario planning of the US armed forces were little different than at the end of the Cold War, and have proven to be wholly inadequate for contemporary US military operations such as fighting small-scale contingencies, pursuing peacekeeping operations or dealing with asymmetric warfare. The US force that entered the 21st century was essentially just a smaller or shrunken version of the Reagan-era Cold War force (Korb, 2000; Williams, 2001). As a consequence, although the US military easily defeated the Iraqi armed forces in the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, it proved ill-equipped for US engagement in the subsequent insurgency. Conclusion 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 (more conciliatory) defence policy agenda pursued by the Obama administration. This article has shown that the rogue states security narrative did not originate with either the Bush administration or America’s response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The main contribution of this article to the existing literature on contemporary US foreign and defence policy and the ‘rogue states’ doctrine has been to comprehensively demonstrate how a new security narrative centred on deviant regimes was gradually pieced together by key actors within the US defence policy community during the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s as policymakers struggled to formulate a new strategic rationale for the purpose of US military power and the definition of the US national interest in the context of declining Cold War tensions. Too often, the starting point for scholarship on contemporary US foreign and defence policy is the moment when strategic policy shifts become more apparent following key events such as 11 September 2001, the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, and apparent public acceptance in the US of the use of military solutions to the rogue states ‘problem’. This article suggests the need for further research that concentrates on examining how the discursive foundations of security policy shifts are gradually built behind the scenes through narrative competition among US defence policymakers. As the article has illustrated, the two distinct security episodes that were most important to the initial development of the rogue states security narrative during the 1990s were the Gulf War in 1991 and the North Korean nuclear crisis in 1993–4. How these two events were interpreted by defence policymakers set the scene for the further consolidation of the rogue states narrative in the late 1990s following the renewed crisis with North Korea, the nuclear tests in India and Pakistan, and the publication of the report of the Rumsfeld Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States. The deliberate alignment of particular interpretations of these events with an emerging rogue states security narrative helped proponents to provide a strategic rationale for continued high defence spending, the maintenance of Cold War-era weapons systems and force-planning models, and contributed to policy continuity across different presidential administrations in the US. Perhaps most important, because the new rogue states security narrative reflected the collective interests of defence policymakers in maintaining ‘business as usual’ rather than entering an uncertain process of radical restructuring and transformation, this helps to explain why potential alternative security narratives — such as those based on the need to restructure the US armed forces for multilateral peacekeeping operations and asymmetric warfare rather than conventional wars using major weapons systems and existing force-planning models — failed to achieve the same level of influence on US security policy. Deviant state behaviour increases ‘analytical uncertainty’; that is, uncertainty about how particular regimes view the world and how they act in the international arena, even if there is little strategic uncertainty about the means and capabilities of a particular state (Iida, 1993). Because it is rooted in a perception of irrational behaviour, the US rogue states concept overlaps with this understanding that deviance from fundamental behavioural norms in international society complicates interpreting and predicting how a regime may act in the international arena. What lies at the core of the US conception of rogue states as irrational actors is not their behaviour in international affairs per se, such as the development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and sponsoring or engaging in terrorist acts. Rather, in the contemporary US defence policy context, how states treat their own populations has evolved as the crucial marker to determine whether they are recognized by US policymakers as ‘rational’ actors in international affairs. This article has demonstrated how, during the 1990s, US defence policymakers actively engaged in the construction of rogue states as the primary threat to US security interests in an attempt to rationalize the discursive uncertainty of the post-Cold War era. The successful construction of a new US security narrative centred on the rogue states threat relied on discrete events that could be discursively framed and understood within this new strategic vision for US defence policymaking. The deliberate concatenation of two unrelated security episodes within a single interpretive framework enabled key actors in US defence policymaking to subsume previously independent discourses on human rights violations, international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction under a single umbrella term — rogue states — and to portray ‘irrational’ regimes as a major source of analytical uncertainty in the international system. As this article has illustrated, these two catalytic events served to cement the interpretation that rogue states now pose the main risk to international stability, which contributed to the consolidation of rogue states as the defining feature of the post-Cold War security narrative in the United States over the course of the 1990s. In such an uncertain and unpredictable security environment, the political possibilities for greater cuts in US military spending and radical restructuring of the US defence architecture during the 1990s quickly diminished, and the stage was set for the aggressive defence policies the George W. Bush administration subsequently pursued once the rogue states threat was further amplified following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.