In contrast to existing accounts, this analysis offers a more comprehensive overview of the emergence and evolution of the rogue states concept prior to the events of 11 September 2001, which served to further accelerate and intensify - rather than transform - existing trends within US security policy. This article contributes to the existing critical literature on the concept of 'rogue' state behaviour and the policy problem of deviant regimes through examining the emerging foundations of the rogue states security narrative in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Email: the most urgent threat to US security interests with his infamous depiction of Iran, Iraq and North Korea as constituting an 'axis of evil' in his State of the Union Address in January 2002 (US White House, 2002). Bush elevated the problem of 'rogue states'Īlexandra Homolar, University of Warwick, Department of Politics and International Studies, Coventry, CV4 7AL, United Kingdom. The article suggests the importance of historicizing contests over the interpretation of international crises in order to both better understand the process through which a country's national security interests are defined and to gain greater analytical purchase on how security narratives are reconstructed during processes of systemic change.Ĭatalytic events, deviant regimes, post-Cold War, security narratives, United Statesįollowing the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001, the potential international security threats that deviant regimes present - and America's military response - have become the central focus of US defence policymaking and have attracted sustained attention from international security scholars (see, for example, Lennon and Eiss, 2004). This is developed through an examination of two crucial episodes in the construction of post-Cold War US national security interests: the crisis in the Persian Gulf in 1990-1 and the North Korean nuclear crisis in 1993-4. The article argues that the puzzle of how US post-Cold War foreign and defence policy came to be focused on 'irrational' - but militarily inferior - adversaries can be understood through analysing how actors within the US defence community discursively constructed discrete international crises as the trigger for a major shift in US threat scenarios. Bush administration's 'Global War on Terror' and President Bush's representation of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an 'axis of evil'. This article examines how the foundations of the 'rogue states' security narrative in the United States developed prior to the declaration of the George W. Rebels without a conscience: The evolution of the rogue states narrative in US security policyĮuropean Journal of International Relations 17(4) 705-727 © The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.Ĭo.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1354066110383996
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