As early as July 1985, President
Ronald Reagan stated that "we are not going to tolerate … attacks from outlaw states by the strangest collection of misfits, looney tunes, and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich," but it fell to the Clinton administration to elaborate on this concept. In the 1994 issue of
Foreign Affairs, U.S. National Security Advisor
Anthony Lake labelled five nations as
rogue states:
North Korea,
Cuba,
Iran,
Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, and
Iraq under Saddam Hussein. He described these regimes as "recalcitrant and outlaw states that not only choose to remain outside the family but also assault its basic values". Cuba was put on the list solely because of the political influence of the Cuban-American community and specifically that of the Cuban American National Foundation (pre-Jorge Mas Santos), whereas
Syria and
Pakistan avoided being added to the list because the United States hoped that Syria could play a constructive role in the Arab-Israeli peace process, and because Washington had long maintained close relations with Pakistan. Three other nations, the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,
Sudan, and the
Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, were treated as
rogue states as well. The US State Department at times labelled Yugoslavia as a "rogue state" because its leader,
Slobodan Milošević, had been accused of violating the rights of his nation's citizens, including but not limited to
attempted genocide in Croatia and orchestrating the
Srebrenica massacre in eastern Bosnia. The United States employed several tools to isolate and punish "rogue states". Tough unilateral economic sanctions, often at congressional behest, were imposed on or tightened against Iran, Libya, Cuba, Sudan, and Afghanistan. After the conclusion of the
Gulf War in 1991, the United States selectively used
airpower against Iraq for years during the
Iraqi no-fly zones to force them in complying with various
United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding
disarmament (i.e.,
Resolution 687) and
human rights (i.e.,
Resolution 688).
Cruise missiles were fired at Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for
terrorist attacks against U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. In March 1999, NATO launched a
massive air-bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in response to the Yugoslav Army's crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in the province of Kosovo. In the last six months of the
Clinton administration, U.S. Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright announced that the term
rogue state would be abolished in June 2000, in favour of the term
states of concern, as three of the nations listed as "rogue states" (Libya, Iran, and North Korea) no longer met the conditions established to define a
rogue state. Libya was removed from the
State Sponsors of Terrorism list in 2006 after achieving success through
diplomacy. Relations with Libya also became more mutual following the eight month
Libyan Civil War in 2011, which resulted in the National Transitional Council ousting longtime Libyan leader
Muammar Gaddafi from power. In 2015, after the US reopened its embassy in
Cuba and restarted diplomatic relations with the Cuban government, Cuba was removed from the list of
State sponsors of terrorism and was no longer referred to as a "rogue state". More recently, the administration of U.S. President
Donald Trump labelled
Venezuela a "rogue state". During the 2017 UN general assembly, UN ambassador
Nikki Haley called Venezuela a global threat and a "dangerous
narco-state". Some figures of the Venezuelan government, like Vice President
Tareck el Aissami and Minister of Defense
Vladimir Padrino López, were permanently banned from entering US territory, due to their involvement with human rights abuses and drug cartels. Later in 2017, the US government banned all high ranking Venezuelan government officials from entering US territory. Currently, due to the
2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis, Nicolas Maduro's government (which controls Venezuela
de facto) is not recognized as legitimate by the United States or most other states in the
Western Hemisphere, with the exceptions of
Cuba,
Dominica,
Nicaragua,
Saint Kitts and Nevis,
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and
Suriname. On 19 June 2020, U.S. Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo called the People's Republic of China a "rogue actor" at the Virtual Copenhagen Democracy Summit, saying that "General Secretary
Xi Jinping has green-lighted a brutal campaign of repression against Chinese Muslims, a human rights violation on a scale we haven’t seen since World War II." In addition, Pompeo cited China's handling of COVID-19, "malicious cyber campaigns" it conducted, and its
treatment of Hong Kong citizens as reasons for labeling China as a rogue actor. After Russia invaded Ukraine, as Sino-Russian relations became increasingly close with establishment of
North Korean–Russian Partnership, this term was also used to refer to Russia in think tanks.
Later terms In the aftermath of the
September 11 attacks, the
Bush administration returned to using a similar term. The concept of
rogue states was replaced by the Bush administration with the concept of an
Axis of Evil, which encompassed
Iraq,
Iran, and
North Korea. U.S. President
George W. Bush first spoke of this "Axis of Evil" during his January 2002
State of the Union Address. More terms, such as
Outposts of Tyranny, would follow suit. Some critics charge that
rogue state merely means any state that is generally hostile to the U.S., or even one that opposes the U.S. without necessarily posing a wider threat. Others, such as author
William Blum, argued that the term is also applicable to the U.S. and
Israel. In his ''
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower'', Blum claimed that the United States defines itself as a rogue state through its foreign policy. == United States as a rogue state ==