From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Wed Feb 17 2010 - 22:37:25 EST
End of the Rogue
The world that created 'rogue states' is gone, and the sooner Washington
recognizes it, the better.
By Nader Mousavizadeh | NEWSWEEK
Published Jan 29, 2010
>From the magazine issue dated Feb 8, 2010
A year after Barack Obama relaunched America's relations with the world's
rogue states, the verdict is in: from Burma to North Korea, Venezuela to
Iran, the outstretched hand has been met with the clenched fist. Aung San
Suu Kyi remains under house arrest in Rangoon, Pyongyang is testing
missiles, Caracas rails against gringo imperialism, and Tehran has
dismissed a year-end deadline to do a deal on its nuclear program.
Engagement has failed and Obama is now poised to deliver on threats of
tougher sanctions, as surely he must. Right? Well, not necessarily.
What Washington has failed to fully recognize is that the world that
created "rogue states" is gone. The term became popular in the 1980s,
mainly in the United States, to describe minor dictatorships threatening to
the Cold War order. Then, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the
main challenge to American dominance came from those states unwilling to
accommodate themselves to the "end of history" and conform to U.S. values.
The idea of "the rogue state" assumed the existence of an international
community, united behind supposedly universal Western values and interests,
that could agree on who the renegades are and how to deal with them. By the
late 1990s this community was already dissolving, with the rise of China,
the revival of Russia, and the emergence of India, Brazil, and Turkey as
real powers, all with their own interests and values. Today it's clear that
the "international community" defined by Western values is a fiction, and
that for many states the term "rogue" might just as well apply to the
United States as to the renegades it seeks to isolate.
The answer to those states challenging the established global order will
not come in the form of carrots or sticks from Washington alone.
Confronting the threats of nuclear proliferation, terror, and regional
instability posed by state and nonstate actors alike will require
coalitions that are genuinely willing—not forged under U.S. pressure. It
is no longer possible for the U.S.—even with Obama as president—to
rally international support for an American, or even a Western, agenda.
What the world seeks from America is more engagement, not less, but based
on partnership, not U.S. primacy. Conventional American leadership, it is
now evident, is as unwelcome in the person of Barack Obama as in George W.
Bush.
In the absence of a newly forged international community, a U.S.-led
crackdown on the old rogues is bound to backfire. Already Western efforts
have driven rogue states into each other's arms—Burma is trading military
hardware and perhaps nuclear secrets with North Korea; Iran is forging
closer ties to Syria; Venezuela is supporting Cuba more lavishly. Worse
than these warming relations among relatively weak troublemakers is their
growing support from legitimate rising powers. Brazil, Turkey, Russia,
China—all are making no secret of their resistance to America's
anti-rogue diplomacy.
Obama came into office thinking that a more responsive diplomacy could
rally global support for the old Western agenda, but that's not enough.
What's needed, more than a change in tone or a U.S. policy review, is a new
set of baseline global interests—neither purely Western nor
Eastern—defined in concert with rising powers who have real influence in
capitals like Rangoon, Pyongyang, and Tehran. This requires a painful
reconsideration of America's place in the world. But it promises real help
from rising powers in shouldering the financial and military burden of
addressing global threats.
Today countries large and small, well behaved and not, are looking for
partners, not patrons. Where Washington looks to punish rogues, seeking
immediate changes in behavior, rival powers are stepping in with investment
and defense contracts, and offering a relationship based on dignity and
respect. This is the story of China in Burma, Russia in Iran, Brazil in
Cuba, and so on down the line. And given that the core institutions of
global governance—the U.N. Security Council, the World Bank, and the
IMF—are unwilling to grant the new powers a seat at the decision-making
table, it's not surprising that they feel no obligation to back sanctions
they've had no say in formulating.
Far from being coy about their newfound independence, the rising powers are
asserting their status with increasing strength. During a recent state
visit, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stood beside
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and declared bluntly: "We don't have
the right to think other people should think like us." These words resonate
more deeply outside the Western world than new calls for unity against the
rogues. Days earlier, Ahmadinejad had been hosted by Turkey's Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had embraced his neighbor at a summit of
Islamic nations and insisted that Iran's nuclear program was "peaceful."
Predictably, the Western press attacked both Lula and Erdogan for betraying
democratic values and solidarity, missing the point entirely. Established
democrats like Lula and Erdogan are not siding with Ahmadinejad, supporting
his government's violent crackdown on protesters or its covert nuclear
programs. Rather, they are demonstrating their intention—and, more
important, their ability—to have a say in who the rogues are and how they
should be dealt with.
The perils of the West's old thinking about rogue states are laid bare in a
corner of Asia that is fast becoming a geopolitical battleground with no
Western presence to speak of. Iran, with its nuclear program, may be the
most acute rogue-state security challenge today; Sudan, with its record of
a genocide overlooked, the most morally troubling; Zimbabwe, with its
spectacle of a society's systematic self-destruction, the most maddening.
But Burma presents perhaps the starkest and most advanced case of the
failure of Western strategies aimed solely at cutting off repressive
regimes. The two-decade-old policy of isolating Burma now looks like a
carefully constructed attempt to weaken Western influence and open the door
to China, while devastating Burma's legitimate economy and doing nothing to
improve its people's human rights.
Rangoon today is a city in a time warp, with battered cars from the '50s
driving down unpaved roads alongside rickshaws, and barefoot children
selling Chinese-made trinkets to the few tourists walking among the
dilapidated, abandoned villas of the city's faded colonial glory. Virtually
no aspect of Western policy here has worked: the military junta is as
firmly in control as ever; the democratic opposition is in disarray; and
where Western policy toward Burma used to be primarily concerned with the
regime's domestic behavior, it now must contend with the generals'
suspected ties to North Korea, including in the area of nuclear
cooperation.
This is not to say that the sanctions haven't had an impact—only that
they have been entirely counterproductive. In a series of recent
conversations with civil-society leaders, businessmen, and foreign
diplomats in Rangoon, a grim picture emerged: a middle class decimated and
forced into exile; an educational system entirely unable to develop the
country's human capital; a private sector hollowed out, with only the
junta's cronies able to profit from trade in the country's natural
resources. One Burmese businessman I spoke with put it best. "We are twice
sanctioned," he lamented. "First by the regime and second by the West."
Hillary Clinton recognized as much recently, stating that "the path we have
taken in imposing sanctions hasn't influenced the Burmese junta." She
added, with considerably less evidence, that "reaching out and trying to
engage them hasn't influenced them either." Now tentative signs of a thaw
in U.S.-Burma relations suggest that engagement may well have an
impact—just not one that satisfies the short-term needs of Western
policymakers and their demands for dramatic concessions.
For the rogues, the rising powers provide both diplomatic cover and
alternative political and economic models. In Burma, Western sanctions have
provided an opportunity for China and India to gain unchallenged economic
and political influence within a country they consider of strategic
significance. In Iran, Western pressure has simply taught officials to
become masters in the arts of forging alternative alliances—with Russia,
China, and others—and of dodging sanctions. While sanctions have slowed
the development of Iran's energy sector and stifled economic growth, the
regime has become adept at shipping banned goods through third countries,
funding its activities in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, and
inviting non-Western entities to step in on commercially attractive terms
in key sectors of the economy such as infrastructure, energy, and
telecommunications. If the purpose of sanctions has been to halt Iran's
nuclear-enrichment program and its ability to project power through
regional proxies like Hizbullah and Hamas, they can only be said to have
failed.
Initially, the Obama administration had the honesty—with itself and the
world—to recognize the limits of sanctions, and to explore instead
whether a policy of engagement addressing Iran's legitimate security
interests could help persuade the regime to halt the weaponization of its
nuclear program. Now, however, with a year-end deadline for progress
lapsed, Obama is expected to pursue a package of "smarter" sanctions on the
energy, transportation, and financial sectors, including on insurance and
reinsurance on trade with Iran. The aim is nothing less than choking the
Iranian economy—extracting a price even this regime will ostensibly be
unable to bear. For an embargo to work, however, the rising powers will
have to be on board. And that's where the problem lies.
>From the outset, the Obama administration assumed that even if a U.S. offer
of engagement didn't sway Tehran, its very reasonableness would bring
Russia and China on board in implementing "crippling" U.N. sanctions. Now,
it may be that Beijing and Moscow prefer a less trigger-happy White House
(leaving aside for the moment the equally likely possibility that the two
would like nothing more than to see the United States bogged down for
decades in yet another costly Middle East conflict). But it has never been
explained why a more conciliatory U.S. administration would alter the rival
interests of Russia and China. Moscow wants a commercial relationship with
Tehran, China wants oil and gas, and both want a strategic foothold in the
Persian Gulf to balance U.S. dominance. As the U.S. narrows its view of
Iran to focus exclusively on nukes, the rising powers see the nuclear issue
as only one facet of their relationship with Iran. In Burma and Iran—no
less than among the other rogues states—decades of Western sanctions have
achieved a perfect storm of deprivation for the people, wealth and job
security for their rulers, and strategic influence for those countries
unmoved by complaints about human-rights abuses. Indeed, in isolating
repressive regimes, the West often hands them an excuse to block the forces
of reform most likely to undermine their rule, and even to rally their
people behind a hated government in the name of opposing foreign
intervention. A new strategy is needed.
Nothing would more dramatically disrupt this status quo than to provide
rogue leaders with what they fear most: a complete end to broad economic
sanctions, open and unfettered trade with the traditional commercial
classes, educational exchanges for their students, and less restrictive
travel policies on the broad population—even as arms embargoes and visa
restrictions on the ruling elite are kept in place. Such a policy would
stand a far greater chance of gaining support among rising and rival
powers—as well as the peoples of the rogue states—and set in motion a
chain of events more likely to result in greater security and accountable
government.
A policy change of this magnitude would, of course, face its greatest
opposition in Washington. For Obama's opponents on the right, it would be
proof positive of his "appeasement" of the Axis of Evil. For his allies on
the activist left, it would constitute a betrayal of their human-rights
agenda. The truth—as he, better than any other U.S. leader, can
explain—is that the American policy of isolating rogues has been a
manifest failure, and that a new and genuine partnership with the powers
that matter today stands a far better chance of promoting both security and
human dignity among the rogues.
Will this approach quickly temper Hugo Chávez's rhetoric or Robert
Mugabe's obstinacy, reduce Kim Jong Il's paranoia, or undermine
Ahmadinejad's brutal grip on power? Unlikely. But it can begin to shape a
global environment less conducive to their rhetoric of resistance and more
vulnerable to the charge of illegitimacy—at home and abroad—that over
time is the true Achilles' heel of any regime. Last, but not least, it
would give Obama's policy of engagement meaning beyond mere words—and
begin to position America as a 21st-century power leading by example, and
not force.
Mousavizadeh, a special assistant to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan from
1997 to 2003, is a consulting senior fellow at the International Institute
for Strategic Studies in London.
Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/232796
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