One would hope that a game based on an official Joint Chiefs of Staff combat simulation called Joint Force Deployment would at least be realistic. You couldn't tell by the civilian version that was released in August 2001. Real War had all the earmarks of an intriguing game, being marketed as the first real-time strategy game to feature a modern weapon systems and a near-contemporary setting. However, Real War ultimately failed to provide a satisfying gaming experience due to a host of frustrating problems, not the least of which was computer AI dumber than a sack of nails. Read More
Real War Rogue States Full Version
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The end of the cold war a decade ago has ushered in a greatly transformed international landscape. Instead of a pacific era of peace and political harmony, the world, and particularly the United States, has been confronted with a menacing challenge of rogue regimes whose propensity for violence is matched by their intentions to disrupt regional stability, contribute to outlaw behavior worldwide, or to possess weapons of mass destruction. Ruthless rogues also endanger American interests and citizens by their active or passive sponsorship of terrorism. If left unchecked, rogue states like Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya, and others will threaten innocent populations, undermine international norms, and spawn other pariah regimes, as the global order becomes tolerant of this political malignancy.
Unless the United States addresses the challenge of rogue states with a combination of force and diplomacy, the new millennium will witness a widening of global anarchy, deteriorating progress toward economic development, and declining political reform. Dire consequences await the United States if it fails to react forcefully to international roguery.
But what has become painfully clear during the 1990s is that a handful of rogue states have rejected the global economic order and international standards for their own belligerent practices. Rogue players are less politically encumbered since Soviet Russia (which sponsored anti-American terrorism through surrogates) is no longer exercising a loose restraint over its clients. The United States has also disengaged from credible actions abroad. Rogues confront a global renaissance of spreading democracy and peace with an atavistic challenge that has yet to be met satisfactorily. Superweapons will expand their ambitions, give them deadly bargaining chips, and imperil thousands of innocent lives. Their links to free-wheeling terrorist cells blur the line between state and nonstate actors, complicating standard countermeasures to hold guilty governments accountable.
This essay explores some policies for dealing with those states that pose the greatest immediate threat. Terrorist rogues throw up deadly challenges to the United States. But we can call on ample examples of past actions for guidance. Lessons can be gleaned from encounters with Iraq, North Korea, Serbia, Iran, Libya, and Cuba over the past few decades. Although history does not set down hard-and-fast principles on statecraft, it does offer analogies and perspective. Tough remedies short of war, in combination, can advance American interests.
The cold war also witnessed pariah states, forerunners to today's rogue nations. Because of their extreme diplomatic isolation, questions of their legitimacy, and international opprobrium, these pariahs looked to their own defense, striving to obtain nuclear weapons. In the late 1970s, South Africa, Taiwan, Israel, and South Korea felt their strategic vulnerability and moved to acquire nuclear bombs to redress their weakness. Pressed hard by Washington, Taiwan, South Africa, and South Korea came off the atomic pariah listing when they ceased pursuing their own nuclear weapons agendas. Other states that met some of the standards of a pariah in the previous era included Rhodesia, Chile, Uganda, and Cuba. But with changing circumstances, they also slipped from this categorization, with the exception of Cuba.2
Contemporary rogue states, like some of their cold war predecessors, receive diplomatic backing from major power patrons. China and Russia sell advanced technology and weapons to Iraq and Iran. Sudan, in turn, receives financing from Iran for terrorist activities. Serbia gets Russian support. The major players have their own ends in mind. Russia makes common cause with Iran, for example, to offset Turkish gains in Central Asia and to garner hard currency for its technology exports. France has commercial interests in mind when it bucks U.S. resolutions on Iraq in the United Nations. So while being largely independent actors, rogue states can still serve the agenda of greater powers.
Unlike the cold war era, however, rogue regimes are now more technologically independent of the major powers as well as politically freer. A diffusion of scientists and engineers means that advanced industrial states no longer have exclusive capabilities in advanced weapons systems. Third world regimes now have access to expertise from their own Western-trained scientists or from expatriates who have left post-Soviet Russia in search of jobs. They also can readily attain the equipment and materials needed to manufacture weapons of mass destruction and missiles. Iran's advances in mid- and long-range missiles and Iraq's strides in developing nuclear, chemical, and biological capabilities bear witness to the changed global circumstances. Likewise, North Korea, one of the world's poorest and most isolated nations, possesses both nuclear and missile capabilities that threaten its neighbors. Pyongyang raised apprehensions afresh in the summer of 1998 with its three-stage rocket launch over Japan to put a satellite into orbit.
A few pundits have characterized India and Pakistan as democratic rogues for going ahead with nuclear tests in May 1998 in the face of international opposition. This mislabeling corrupts the understanding of the already vague term rogue, which, in the case of India and Pakistan, has been misapplied to states exercising assertive defense options. Neither meets the criteria of a rogue state in the way that, say, Iraq does. Both have democratically elected governments. But within both countries, domestic pressure as well as strategic interests overrode the anticipated damage of internationally imposed sanctions in their decisions to detonate fissionable material.
The final category, and the subject of this essay, is the terrorist rogue state. This deadly manifestation in the emerging world order has captured Washington's attention. These nation-states fail to comply with the rules of international law. Their behavior is defiant and belligerent. They promote radical ideologies. They share an anti-Western bias, in general, and an anti-American hatred, in particular. Rogue political systems vary, but their leaders share a common antipathy toward their citizens' participating in the political process. They suppress human and civil rights as do diplomatic rogue states, but their international bellicosity is the key variable drawing our attention to them.
Rogue nations often possess larger conventional military forces than their national defense warrants, sponsor international terrorism, and strive to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Violent acts toward nearby states are attributable to rogues such as Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, and North Korea, which are classified by the U.S. Department of State as terrorist states. Although Iraq, Iran, and North Korea have captured the lion's share of Washington's antiterrorist attention during the 1990s, the other states have supplied "passive" forms of support to terrorism in the form of training facilities and safe havens for subversive agents. Afghanistan's willingness to lend sanctuary to Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi Arabian businessman turned terrorist, makes it a terrorist-supporting state capable of inflicting harm on the United States and its citizens. The peril posed by rogues to Americans and U.S. interests has intensified with the dispersal of weapons of mass destruction following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In today's globally interconnected world, events on one side of the planet can influence actions on the other side, meaning that how the United States responds to a regional rogue has worldwide implications. Rogue leaders draw conclusions from weak responses to aggression. That Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, escaped unpunished for his invasion of Kuwait no doubt emboldened the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, in his campaign to extirpate Muslims from Bosnia-Herzegovina in pursuit of a greater Serbia. Deterring security threats is a valuable mechanism to maintain peace, as witnessed by the cold war, and it may afford the only realistic option available. But in dealing with rogue states deterrence and containment may not be enough. Before NATO intervened in the Bosnia imbroglio in 1995, to take one example, the ethno-nationalist conflict raised the specter of a wider war, drawing in the neighboring countries of Greece, Turkey, and Russia.
A global doctrine setting forth all-inclusive guidelines is difficult to cast in stone. Containment, the doctrine articulated in response to Soviet global ambitions, offered a realistic guideline for policymakers. A similar response to rogue states cannot be easily cloned for each contingency but may require the United States to corral allies or partners into a unified policy, as circumstances dictate. But watching rogue behavior with complacency or relying on the United Nations courts disaster in the age of weapons of mass destruction.
Terrorist rogue states, in contrast, must be confronted with robust measures, or the world will go down the same path as it did in the 1930s, when Europe and the United States allowed Nazi Germany to propagate its ideology across half a dozen states, to rearm for a war of conquest, and to intimidate the democracies into appeasement. Rogue states push the world toward anarchy and away from stability. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser to President Carter, cited preventing global anarchy as one of the two goals of "America's global engagement, namely, that of forging an enduring framework of global geopolitical cooperation." The other key goal is "impeding the emergence of a power rival."4 2ff7e9595c
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