Citation
WASHINGTON, April 14 (Reuter) - Iran, Iraq and North Korea are among a
small group of countries the United States regards as rogue states
but Washington's attempts to isolate them politically and economically
may be hard to enforce.
The phrase rogue states
is increasingly heard from U.S. policymakers.
Sometimes they are also referred to as outlaw or pariah states
but
the intent is the same. These countries, in Washington's view, should
be put outside the pale.
In a lecture earlier this week, Washington's United Nations ambassador,
Madeleine Albright, said there were four classes of states in the world
today.
The first and largest she called international good citizens
--
countries which followed the rules and wanted to live in peace.
A second class, she said, were emerging democracies aspiring to
complete their transformation and become good citizens. A third group
were countries that did not have the wherewithal to exist as coherent
states -- countries like Somalia, Liberia and Rwanda.
Finally there were what Albright called the rogue states.
Her list
included Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, Sudan and Serbia -- countries
that did everything they could to disrupt the orderly conduct of
international relations either by acquiring or spreading nuclear or
unconventional weaponry, or by sponsoring terrorism, trafficking in
narcotics or by engaging in wars of aggression and ethnic conquest.
National Security Adviser Anthony Lake used the term backlash states
in an article that appeared last month in the journal Foreign Affairs.
He said the United States had a duty to neutralize, contain and
through selective pressure eventually transform
these countries. He
rejected the idea of trying to offer positive inducements, such as
trade or aid concessions or loan rescheduling, to persuade them to
improve their behaviour.
Many of these countries appear on the U.S. annual list of states deemed
to be sponsors of terrorism or on its list of countries trafficking in
narcotics.
As such, they are banned from receiving most categories of U.S. aid and
credits and Washington votes against granting these countries loans in
international financial organisations.
But the United States now seeks to isolate these countries even
further. Lynn Davies, undersecretary of state for military affairs,
told reporters last week Washington wanted the successor to the old
Cold War Cocom organisation to include rules not to sell advanced
military or dual-use technology to what she called rogue states.
Analysts believe there is scant hope of this happening because
different countries pursue different interests and there is no
internationally accepted consensus of what constitutes a rogue state.
It is a denial of international relations and a projection of the
naive concept that all politics are like domestic U.S. politics,
said
Paul Goble, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace.
Iranian scholar Shahram Chubin doubts that the outlaw state
concept
is much use when dealing with Iran because Washington's allies are also
its commercial competitors, anxious to take advantage of whatever
opportunities exist.
In the case of Iraq, countries as diverse as Russia, France, Turkey and
Jordan would like to see international sanctions eased so they could
recoup commercial losses and take advantage of a major market.
In the case of Iran, Russia's interests are very different from
America's. Russia has already sold submarines to Tehran and more
weapons could be in the pipeline.
As researcher Geoffrey Kemp points out in a new book on U.S.-Iranian
relations, even Washington confounds its own rhetoric, allowing U.S.
companies to export almost $1 billion to Iran last year.
This included major oil drilling and engineering equipment, while U.S.
oil companies bought up to $4 billion of Iranian oil, providing Tehran
with valuable hard currency.
(c) Reuters Limited 1994
