The Rogue Question
by Clay Risen

Social Security. Middle-class tax cuts. Education reform. Ballistic missile defense? Who'd of thought — after eight years of following the yellow brick road of post-Cold War economic growth, the 2000 presidential race has suddenly, inexplicably, taken up an issue most people imagined had been buried with the fall of Communism.

And yet in many ways, ballistic missile defense makes the perfect election-year issue. Republicans use it to appear hawkish on military issues and to promote the defense industry; Democrats embrace a smaller, limited version as proof that they are not weak on defense but are still fiscally responsible. There's rhetoric ("rogue states," "nuclear blackmail"), nostalgia (Reagan's Star Wars legacy) and patriotism. But while Gore, Bush and every policy wonk in between have spent the last few months debating plans for a ballistic missile defense system, few have thought to question what all this is about in the first place.

Most of these folks, when asked, will reply that we need BMD to prevent an attack by "rogue states," a group that usually includes North Korea, Iraq and Iran. It has become conventional wisdom to assume that these countries are not only forever on the brink of nuclear proliferation, but that when (and never if) they do, they will immediately use their arsenals against the United States. For most in the establishment, this is not even a question.

Yet there are some voices who speak out against the all-too-quick, overly pat assumptions about "rogue states." Spurgeon Keeney, Jr., the director of the Arms Control Association, notes that "the world looks in disbelief at the spectacle of the only remaining superpower cringing in terror at the prospect that a weak, impoverished North Korea might develop a missile capable of reaching the United States, and wonders what the true U.S. motives are in seeking a NMD."

Keeney writes that much of the recent evidence supporting a "rogue state" threat comes from a 1997 report (the so-called Rumsfeld Report) that discusses the possibilities of proliferation among nations that lie outside the scope of international law. But while previous reports had always analyzed the most likely prospects for proliferation, this one focuses only the worst-case scenarios.

Likewise, whereas previous discussions of proliferation used wording such as "potential" and "could," the Clinton administration has shifted to more definite wording — "will" or "is" or "has already proliferated," wording that is not supported by even the Rumsfeld Report. What starts out as "could potentially develop nuclear weapons by 2015" becomes, roughly, "North Korea has the bomb."

What's more, all three nations singled out as potential proliferators have shown little if any sign of progress toward nuclear roguery. Recent improvements in relations between the two Koreas not only point to a dramatic drop in tensions in the near future, but also prove that North Korea's Kim Jong Il is hardly a stereotypical "crazy leader." Iraq, suffering under the weight of over a decade of sanctions, has neither the resources nor the manpower to develop and test a nuclear force, and Iran, which (seemingly unbeknownst to most) is going through a dramatic democratic flowering, is hardly the picture of our next nuclear enemy. And even if one of them did develop a weapon, it's hard to see why they would risk utter annihilation just to get a shot off at the Great Satan.

Of course, the convenient logic of the "rogue state" is that they are not logical — that a rogue state might lob a missile at New York, just for the hell of it. Setting the racist aspects of this logic aside (after all, who's worried about German or Israeli proliferation?), even our own favorite crazy dictator would find it hard to justify throwing away his entire country for one hot nuclear minute. Why do we assume that Mutually Assured Destruction prevents a country with 6,000 weapons from using them, but not a country with one?

Realism, however, is not always realistic, at least close up. The foreign policy establishment needs to maintain the existence of dire threats to American interests abroad; it produces documents like the Rumsfeld Report to justify our extensive military and diplomatic deployments, which in turn reinforce our powerful position on the world stage.

And in this light, it should be no surprise that both Gore and Bush are considering extending their proposed missile shields to our allies and other "civilized" countries. It is the extension of Cold War logic by other means — if there is a global threat that only the United States can answer, then the United States is justified in doing whatever is necessary to counter it. The risk is that in the fluid, post-Cold-War world, other countries are not going to follow along, and might just turn on us instead.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.