Alternatives 34 (2009), 229248

Rogue Specters: Cuba and North Korea at the Limits of US Hegemony

Katherine Gordy and Jee Sun E. Lee*

The United States continues to label North Korea and Cuba rogue states of unique international distinction even though their economic, political, and military power has declined steadily since 1990. The authors argue that persistence of the label and accompanying US behavior is best understood by expanding upon a Schmittian frame of analysis to demonstrate that the designation of rogue state determines the normative weight given to certain behaviors, rather than the other way around. Examining the distinctive mode of politics practiced by North Korea and Cuba shows that they do pose threats to the United States, but not in the ways traditionally recognized by liberal states. Rather, through the anomalous role they play in the US-led system, their relentlessly polemical political discourse, and their excitable speech and ideological unmasking, they highlight the primacy of the political dimension determining their relationship with the United States and the contradictions underlying the universalism of US hegemony. KEYWORDS: North Korea, Cuba, rogue states, US hegemony

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Cuba and North Korea have devoted most of their resources to economic and political survival, hoping to integrate into the capitalist world system and normalize relations with the United States. Unlike transnational movements of radical political Islam such as al-Qaeda, which are gaining force globally, movements fuelled by Marxism-Leninism have little presence, particularly on a global level. Cuba and North Korea now place more emphasis on nationalism than Marxism-Leninism, although nationalism was always
*Gordy, Department of Political Science, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave., HSS 263, San Francisco, CA 94116. E-mail: kgordy@sfsu.edu; Lee, Asiatic Research Center, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea. E- mail: jeesunelee@yahoo.com

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an essential ingredient of their revolutionary ideologies. Despite this ideological reorientation, the difficult living conditions in these countries, and their unconventional, yet clear, overtures to the United States for acceptance, the United States continues to name Cuba and North Korea as international rogues of distinction: They are portrayed as unrepentant, unredeemable, old-fashioned Marxist-Leninist states with one foot in the grave. For the majority of Democrats and Republicans alike, nothing short of a complete overhaul of Cuba and North Koreas existing systems will suffice. Why? The conventional explanation suggests that, as relics of the past and as states out of step with the progress of history, Cuba and North Korea are hazardous because their desperate autocrats are willing to put the world and their own populations at risk to achieve their malevolent objectives or to hold onto their power: These countries are ruled by reckless, outlaw, fiendish leaders untrammeled by international norms and laws. Their weakness makes them not less menacing, but more so; their irrationality makes them not just threats or enemies, but rogues.1 We argue that such an understanding obstructs complex analyses of these two countries and has had disabling effects on the ability to deal with them in a constructive fashion. Many have pointed to the ways in which the United States uses assertions of rogueness indiscriminately and instrumentally. Yet we also argue here that an examination of the specific charges brought up under the rogue state heading against Cuba and North Korea shows that the real threats from these countries lie elsewhere. North Korea and Cuba do pose threats to the United States, but not in ways that have been identified within a contradictionbedeviled postCold War US political discourse. A comparison of the two countries illuminates a particular style of politics that Cuba and North Korea share. This style of politics is highlighted both by the way in which US political discourse and policy treat them and by their responses to this treatment. What this examination will show is that North Korea and Cuba are threats because, while the combination of their weakness and bravado appear to make them the ideal enemy, any US engagement with these two countries forces to the surface a political discussion about issues the United States wishes to claim a monopoly on or declare irrelevant.

The CubaNorth Korea Pairing

The great socioeconomic changes operating in Korea and Cuba demonstrate that if these countries, although small, struggle valiantly without fear of death, they can overcome imperialism and their

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oppressors and successfully construct socialism and that no force is capable of getting in the way of the people [los pueblos] marching towards socialism.2 Kim Il Sung, Indestructible Friendship and Fraternal Solidarity between the Korean and Cuban People, speech during a 1986 meeting of the masses in the city of Pyongyang in homage to Comrade Fidel Castro, in a book of speeches by Kim Il Sung published in Cuba

The commonalities between North Korea and Cuba do not begin and end with their rogue status. Both countries feel threatened by the United States. Since the 1959 Revolution, Cuba, only 90 miles from Florida, has experienced the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, CIAsponsored acts of sabotage and counterrevolution, and paramilitary attacks launched from US territory. The United States has maintained a naval base at Guantanamo Bay since 1903. The George W. Bush administrations Report to the Commission on a Free Cuba contains a classified annex that Cuban officials and others suspect includes plans for a military invasion of the island. The Obama administration has taken a less harsh line by easing travel restrictions to Cuba for Cuban Americans and expressing a willingness to talk with Raul Castro, yet it supports and enforces the embargo and insists that the Cuban government must take a number of important steps, such as freeing political prisoners and lowering remittance fees, before the United States will talk. At the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad in April 2009, President Barack Obama declared: The Cuban people are not free and thats our lodestone, our North Star, when it comes to our policy in Cuba.3 Since its inception, North Korea (the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, DPRK) has lived under the threat of a nuclear attack from the United States: The threat was greatest during the Korean War, but exists to this day. One only need look at threats made by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice emphasizing US long-range nuclear strike capacity to hit North Korea. The country also bears the scars of the Korean War. Far more napalm was dropped on North Korea than was dropped on Vietnam.4 US troops remain stationed at the demilitarized zone and inside South Korea, and the United States is still technically at war with North Korea. Both Cuba and North Korea insist that their socialism is a form unique to that nations historical and cultural needs, rather than a Marxism-Leninism imported from abroad. Both countries claim to be carrying on anticolonial struggles that began in the nineteenth century and were foiled by US involvement. For Cuba, its independence from Spain in 1902 was compromised by the continual US occupation

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of the island, either directly through the military or indirectly through economic control, from 1902 up until the 1959 revolution. The DPRK too saw its struggle against Japanese occupation and its attempts to unify the country interrupted by US military presence: Soon after the defeat of Japan in World War II, the peninsula fractured into two separate political systems that the Korean civil war only further crystallized and consolidated. North Korea and South Korea, each claiming to represent the true authentic Korean nation, have dealt with fierce antagonisms for over half a century. They have grown symbiotically, at times, providing mirror images of each other. There are also differences between these two countries. Cuba does not conduct nuclear and missile tests. In spite of official anti-US rhetoric, Cuba historically has had strong cultural and familial ties to the United States. Freedom of speech and other civil liberties are not curtailed and punished in Cuba to the extent that they are in North Korea. Cubans have not suffered the same level of deprivation that North Koreans have experienced. Cuba has far more defenders in the US and elsewhere than does North Korea. Finally, the strength of the Cuban American National Foundation lobby and a large Cuban population in a swing state are key factors in explaining US policy toward Cuba. However, the United States was suspicious of the revolution even before Fidel Castros turn to socialism, and the Bush administrations policies were increasingly at odds with a more conciliatory approach supported by many, even in the Cuban-American community in South Florida.5 The Obama administration did not so much challenge the power of the Cuban lobby as recognize its internal transformations. Yet these striking similarities and differences are usually lost in characterizations by the US government, press, and even at times in academia, where the countries are readily reduced to one word: rogue.

Rogues and Rogue States Rogueness as a category of states is neither well defined nor coherent. While used until the 1970s to describe dictatorships with undesirable or abhorrent domestic policies, it was most forcefully articulated in a 1993 speech by Clintons then National Security Advisor Anthony Lake. In his From Containment to Enlargement speech, Lake argued that backlash or rogue states were states outside the newly expanded and triumphant circle of democracy and markets, whose leaders were threatened by the subversive ideas of democracy and market economics. These states were more likely to traffic in terrorism, pose a military threat to regional and/or global stability, support the violation of human rights, pursue weapons of mass destruction,

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and fail to abide by the rules and norms of the international system. To counter the presence and threat of rogue regimes, Lake recommended that the United States work within international norms and institutions, but also strike back unilaterally, if necessary, for rogue regimes were those that exhibit a chronic inability to engage constructively with the outside world.6 Lakes criteria seeped into the foreign policy of the Clinton and Bush II administrations. However, there exists no consensus on the concept. Robert Litwak points out that not only is rogueness a new category of states that has come into predominance in the postCold War era, but it is an American political rubric without standing in international law and remains an American creation around which no consensus exists among US allies. Drawing upon the observation that rogueness is a political category employed by one or more great powers with a stake in the maintenance and orderly working of the international system, Litwak suggests that the rogue label designates what the United States, the most powerful state in the international system, wants it to designate: In the last instance, the rogue label refers to the demonization of a group of states according to politically selective criteria.7 Litwak argues that employing this political rubric significantly distorts US foreign policy making and accounts for its systematic failure to produce its desired goal: regime change or drastic changes in behavior. However, what this otherwise informative treatment fails to account for is why the rogue concept continues to be useful despite producing such unsuccessful outcomes. There remains too much of an assumption of rationality of means and ends in US foreign policy and an inability to locate the power of rogueness precisely in its distortional taxonomy of states. Authors like Paul Hoyt and Noam Chomsky have taken the argument further, pointing to the use of the rogue concept by the United States to pursue its own interests in a changed world of international relations that has lost its raison dtre.8 The statements of US officials and US policy toward the DPRK and Cuba show that the rogue category lacks analytic purchase and can be subject to abuse. Yet US statements and the exchanges between the United States on the one hand, and the DPRK and Cuba on the other, illustrate a particular kind of international political behavior that calls into question, albeit subtly, US hegemony, even as the situations of their own countries would seem to discredit any of their claims about their own systems superiority.

Retrograde Rogues Reports of the failing health of Fidel Castro and Kim Jong Il began circulating in 2006, sparking hopes that their deaths would bring an end

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to the socialist system that they had supposedly either single-handedly imposed, in the case of Castro, or perpetuated, in the case of Kim Jong Il, who inherited the communist system from his father. US officials, academics, and pundits use the metaphor of death in their analyses of both Cuba and North Korea, placing Kim Jong Il on a par with Fidel Castro as the life force of a system that is only buying time before its people, released from fear, are free to adopt a capitalist liberal democratic system. Events, including the February 2008 National Assembly of Peoples Power election of Fidel Castros brother Raul as president of Cuba, have done little to challenge this popular metaphor. Such awesome power is not attributed to figures such as Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of one of the most devastating attacks against the United States, despite the inundation of images of his countenance (even on Wanted Dead or Alive posters). Radical Islam has been depicted as the essence of evil, but the faces representing it are numerous. The argument goes that what makes Islamism dangerous is that it is a many-headed hydraalways having another disillusioned and misguided youth ready to fill the ranks of Islamist warriors. While there are still shouts of victory when an important Islamist fundamentalist is slain, there is a simultaneous recognition in US official discourse that this is not enough. Not so with Cuba and North Korea, regimes assumed to be so infirm that the slightest push will do them in. Cuba and North Korea are weak. Cuba was hit hard by the dissolution of the Soviet trading bloc (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or CMEA) in 1991. Cuba joined CMEA in 1972 and by the 1980s, it was conducting 85 percent of its total (import-export) trade with them.9 Between 1989 and 1992, total trade with member countries of CMEA fell 93 percent.10 Between 1989 and 1993, Cuban national output fell by more than 50 percent.11 Through a variety of economic reforms, the government survived the 1990s with certain achievements of the revolution intact, but there is now increasing inequality and poverty in a country that was previously strong egalitarian and provided a decent standard of living to its citizens. Whereas in 1985 poverty affected just above 6 percent of the population, it was affecting about 20 percent in 2002.12 Those without access to hard currency, either through tourism and select industries or through remittances, are at a distinct disadvantage. North Koreas economy suffered even greater setbacks with the withdrawal of Soviet aid and subsidized trade. Scholars such as Nicholas Eberstadt point to the growing crisis of the North Korea economy, sliding from a slowdown of economic growth rates in the 1970s, to stagnation in the 1980s, and to further severe decline in the 1990s.13 A series of food shortages and famines struck the country in the 1990s. It is estimated that up to two million people died as a result of the famines

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of 19951997, yet even this has been called little more than a guesstimate. Much uncertainty exists regarding the current status of the North Korean economy and the extent of its deterioration. What is certain is that the country continues to request and receive international aid and that its economy is struggling to produce or procure enough food and energy to provide the basic survival needs of its people.14 The weakened state of both economies, the decline of MarxismLeninism as a global ideology, and the rise of transnational movements of radical political Islam have done little to alter US treatment of Cuba and North Korea as threats. In 2004 The Miami Herald reported that the US Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control had six times as many personnel devoted to tracking down violators of the US blockade of Cuba than they did to tracking down Osama Bin Laden.15 In 2007 Cuba and the DPRK appeared yet again on the US State Departments List of State Sponsors of Terror, defined as states that provide critical support to non-state terrorist groups and without whose support terrorist groups would have greater difficulty obtaining the funds, weapons, materials, and secure areas they require to plan and conduct operations.16 During her 2005 confirmation hearings as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice named both states outposts of tyranny, arguing that they failed the town square test, whereby a person living in a particular country could walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment and physical harm.17 Cuba and North Korea are not alone on the 2007 List of State Sponsors of Terror, which also included Iran, Sudan, and Syria. Rice also named Iran, Zimbabwe, Burma, and Belarus outposts of tyranny. Cuba and North Korea share with many of these other countries a history of socialism, third world nationalism, and anti-American rhetoric. But while these other countries find themselves on and off such lists, North Korea and Cuba have been consistently characterized by the United States as grave threats to the stability of the world system ever since both countries were lost to Communism. If one uses Derridas distinction between the rogue as adjective and rogue as noun, Cuba and North Korea are not simply accused of having rogue attributes, they are considered rogues by nature.18 Contemporary treatments of North Korea and Cuba tend to ignore history, attributing the current situation to maniacal leaders and a brainwashed populace. Typical treatments can be found in various foreign policy and international relations accounts of the DPRK and Cuba. These are punitive accounts or attributions of pathology, which aim toward rehabilitation, isolation, regime change, or destruction of the two states. Analysis of the countries is aimed less toward a consideration of their particular histories and processes of formation and

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more toward their political and economic transformation.19 One writer summarized the view of various policymakers and experts on North Korea as follows:
For much of the US foreign-policy establishment, North Korea was a blank screen on which to project their own predispositions and prejudices. Those predispositions and prejudices were informed by the widely shared image of North Korea as a rogue state, an implacable and inimical outlaw with a master plan to deceive the world and acquire nuclear weapons . . . To many, North Korea is the archetypal rogue state, and an old-fashioned communist one at that, motivated to nuclear arms by paranoid hostility to the outside world. Its one-man rule, internal regimentation, and dogmatism would alienate any freedom-loving American.20

Such appears to have been the reaction of President George W. Bush to the DPRK leader, I loathe Kim Jong Il! . . . Ive got a visceral reaction to this guy.21 While the former undersecretary for arms control and international security, John Bolton, falsely informed an audience at the Heritage Foundation that the United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort and that Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states, President Bush in his 2002 address described North Korea as a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens.22 According to Bush, North Korea, along with Iran and Iraq, constituted an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. Continuing the war of words, in July of 2003, Bolton referred to Kim Jong Il as a tyrannical dictator of a country where life is a hellish nightmare while in that same year then Secretary of State Colin Powell called Cuba an aberration in the West.23 A year later, a report from the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba concluded: The Castro regime continues to be a threat not only to its own people, but also to regional stability, the consolidation of democracy and market economies in the Western Hemisphere, and the people of the United States.24 While Cuba was not included in the original axis of evil, Otto Reich concluded in a 2005 article entitled Latin Americas Terrible TwoFidel Castro and Hugo Chavez Constitute an Axis of Evil, that it was from these two figures that the the real danger to regional peace and stability emanated.25 As one historian aptly put it in 1999: Much of US policy towards Cuba during the past forty years has been driven by a determination to punish Cuba for the transgressions of Fidel Castro and a determination to resist a modus vivendi with Cuba as long as he remains in power.26 Although there is a larger and more nuanced body of academic literature on Cuba than on North Korea,

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much of it in the United States veers toward the punitive and etiolating, tending to focus on whether or not the blockade is a useful policy tool. The question animating much of this work is not whether the Cuban government should be dismantled but rather when and how. Added to this inability or refusal to deal with current reality in Cuba and North Korea is a voracious appetite for predicting and planning for what will happen, as the journal Foreign Policy put it, when the Big Man goes down (referencing Fidel Castro and Kim Jong Il) or how these countries will transform themselves while transcending tragedies of the past (referring to these countries experiments with socialism).27 In these accounts, any consequences of the socialist experiment should be erased and can easily be done so, because the people, in their hearts, never really wanted socialism in the first place. Some contemporary treatments of these two countries endeavor to grasp the reality of daily life in Cuba and North Korea: They admit a kind of fascination with the outcast countries, perhaps in sympathy with the revolutionary, socialist origins of the nations, but they also end up idealizing and exoticizing them. The Last Paradise: North Korea, a work of photo-surreal journalism, is introduced with a description of the authors pilgrimage to the country, and their inability to grasp the real North Korea. Comparing their experience to a visit to a remote museum:
The metaphor of a museum is doubly apt in North Koreas case, because what a foreign visitor has a chance to observe is the last remaining example of those once myriad Marxist-Leninist revolutions that once swept the globe, promising their downtrodden peoples a socialist paradise. Now, however, like the woolly mammoth or the flightless auk, these revolutions, too, have all but vanished into political extinction.28

The last moments of North Korea have become an object to be captured, the waning and the dying of the country to be preserved for the future in flash frozen frames. The photographer embraces the all-encompassing mass fantasy of North Korea, and plunges himself into its vision of political system and ideology so as to highlight the pathological yearnings that the leaders of this brutal and failed state have to maintain, a heroic and triumphant pose even as their magnificently mad revolutionary quest fails. The Last Paradise is worlds removed from the concerns of policymakers or scholars of international relations. Nevertheless, there is a striking convergence toward death in the two opposed modes of understanding. The Last Paradise offers an ultra-lite ethnography of the DPRK, but it is also a visual obituary for the end of socialism, the end of Marxism, and perhaps even

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the end of revolution. In the context of the global collapse of socialism, what remains is the spectacle, the facade, the fetish, and the fantasy of North Korea: It is the stubborn insistence on maintaining the semblance of this fanciful, virtual world of revolutionary accomplishment, where none exists in reality, that makes North Korea such an interesting and important place to visit.29 Fascination with the ruins of socialism can also be seen in numerous photography books and journalistic accounts of 1990s Cuba. The books focus on crumbling buildings and vintage cars of Havana and juxtapose images of socialist slogans to ones of material scarcity and inequality. The US economic blockade of Cuba and restrictions on travel and academic exchange help to maintain Cubas image as a forbidden island. Yet Cubas geographic proximity to the United States, the continual arrival of Cubans from the island, and the relatively open nature of Cuban society has meant that information on Cuba is far more available in the United States than information on North Korea. Finally, US restrictions do not affect the large number of academics who work on Cuba and come from countries whose governments have much more friendly relations with the Cuban government. Few people of any nationality have been able to do substantial research in North Korea. Even within the US academy, Cuban studies as a distinct discipline has evolved significantly since its inception in the early 1960s. As one Cuban specialist wrote:
Continuous scholarship on Cuba for three decades has changed the initial Manichaean vision of the Revolution, supplanting it by a more accurate vision and developing a minimum consensus on key issues. . . . We may debate the rate of economic growth or degree of diversification of the Cuban economy, but few of us will totally reject the revolutionary accomplishments in health care, education, and social security or claim that Cuba is a Soviet puppet.30

In spite of the greater diversity and amount of information available on Cuba, more refined academic accounts of either country go relatively unheeded by those responsible for the dominant US discourse on the two countries which, on the one hand, characterizes Cuba and North Korea as threats to their own people, to the United States, and to global and regional stability and as countries that the US government must focus on overhauling and, on the other hand, characterizes the two countries as economically, politically, and historically doomed, their cautious, erratic, and government-controlled economic reforms only serving to forestall their inevitable collapse. The contradiction in US discourse is clear: North Korea and Cuba are placed front and center as dangerous rogue states whose present

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economic and political systems are completely unacceptable. This same discourse, however, consigns them to the dustbin of history, characterizing their systems as archaic, retrograde, in the final stages of decay, and as the last holdouts against the global tide of liberal, free-market democratization. In this discourse these threatening rogue states are held together only by the presence of one or two powerful individuals whose death or downfall will lead to the dissolution of the entire system.31 Of course, weak states, precisely because they are unstable, can be considered threats if accompanied by other conditions. The DPRK and Cuba have been designated as rogue regimes by the United States primarily based upon four criteria: They pose a military threat to regional and/or global stability; they seek to acquire or develop weapons of mass destruction; they sponsor or support terrorism; and they challenge and flout international norms and laws, failing to play by the rules of the system. If we rely upon the US governments own assessment that Cubas conventional military, personnel, expenditures, and activities have been significantly reduced since the loss of Soviet subsidies, the first two do not apply to Cuba.32 North Korea fulfills all four criteria to varying degrees, and in particular in reference to its nuclear weapons ambitions.33 Cuba and North Korea are both designated as state sponsors of terror by the US State Department based upon their supposed links to terrorist organizations and primarily on their unwillingness to actively participate in the US-led War on Terror.34 Because these two states engage in these activities in varying degrees, they merit such treatment and categorization as rogue. We argue, however, that this is to see things from the wrong end of the telescope, and that a closer examination will demonstrate the way that the political determines the specific normative weight given to their behavior.

The Primacy of the Political Cuba and North Korea are treated as dangerous by the United States, not because of one specific element of their behavior but rather because of a combination of discourse and modes of interaction, which are provoked by the United States, but are also products of the particular histories and ideological positionings of these two countries. To put it another way, it is not possible to understand the nature of the threat posed by these two states unless we reverse the order of determination and reduce things to their most fundamental level. Political actions and motives, Carl Schmitt argued, ultimately can be pared down to the friend-enemy distinction. While other distinctions

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ethical, economic, or religiouscan transmogrify into political ones, the political cannot be reduced to them. Moreover, the political does not reside in the battle itself . . . but in the mode of behavior which is determined by this possibility.35 Against the background of the friend-enemy distinctionthe flouting of international norms, the projected possession of nuclear weapons, or the sponsoring of terrorism, and so onthe differences between the United States and these two states gain coherence, they assume meaning. The rogue concept, no matter how inconsistent or arbitrary its usage, becomes comprehensible in this context of decisionism. It is because they exist as enemies that the different aspects of rogue behavior matter in the way they do: One political community pitted against another political community. As one scholar put it, Schmitt held that political conflicts over interests transform the very content of these interests, as they are polemically formulated and reformulated in struggle with an enemy whose own interests come to be seen as the negation of ones own.36 Another point can be brought to bear here: Schmitts critique of liberalisms neutralization and evasion of politics. Liberalisms uneasiness with the naked brutality underlying politics, its translation of the political into the culturally neutral (not the rule of force and power but the rule of law), the operation of the market, and the universality of morals, means that liberal states are more willing to evade the political even as they engage in politics at its most basic level. Cuba and North Korea in the role of US enemy attempt to remove this liberal smoke screen37 and assert the primacy of the political distinction, the possibility of war that has determined much of their mode of behavior for over half a century. North Korea and Cuba live, as it were, the friend-enemy distinction. Their excitable speech not only makes it easy for the United States to treat them as threats, but also speaks to the polemical relationship-struggle with the enemy. There is here no simple conflict of interests as such. Cuba and North Korea fire back long-winded responses, fierce retorts, acute recriminations, and plain smack-downs in the face of the most powerful state in the world. To give a few examples: At a news conference in 2005, the Foreign Ministry spokesman for North Korea announced that then President Bush was a half-baked man in terms of morality and a philistine whom we can never deal with and that Bush was the worlds dictator who has turned the world into a sea of blood.38 In 2003 John Bolton described Kim Jong Il as a tyrannical dictator of a country where life is a hellish nightmare; North Korea responded in kind, saying that such human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled to take part in the talks. A selection from a 1997 North Korean paper on reunification illustrates how the DPRK enjoins the United States to engage with the country as its equal:

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The question of easing the tension and removing the danger of war in our country can be settled, before all else, when the United States gives up its hostile policy against our Republic and a peace treaty is concluded between the DPRK and the United States. . . . Although the United States clamors about the end of the cold war and easing of the tension, she is invariably resorting to the power politics, threatening us with ceaseless military exercises and aggressive maneuvers. . . . Trying to bring us to our knees by military threat or pressure is a foolish attempt and a dangerous act.39

Another instance of excitable speech is Cubas retort to the United States in 2004 when the US Interests Section in Havana decorated its building with Christmas lights, Santa Claus, and a giant 75 in recognition of the political prisoners jailed following a 2003 crackdown.40 After the United States refused the Cuban governments request to remove the decorations and sign, the Cuban government posted enormous photos of scenes of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and US soldiers pointing guns at children along with signs reading fascists and made in the USA stamped over a swastika on billboards across the street. One countrys human rights abuses do not absolve those of another, yet the exchange served to diminish the clear distinction the United States wishes to make between itself and others. Additionally, Fidel Castro entered the public arena again in 2007 with two reflections published in the party paper Granma. The first, titled More than Three Billion People in the World Condemned to Premature Death from Hunger and Thirst, criticized Bush for advocating the diversion of food from the mouths of the hungry in the developing world to the production of ethanol as an alternative fuel source in the United States. In his second reflection, The Internationalization of Genocide, Castro chastised Bush for failing to take into account the environmental and social costs of increased corn production in developing nations and for ignoring the importance of energy-efficiency measures.41 He ended with an expression of concern about possible wars for oil and the US search for a pretext to invade Iran. I am not exaggerating or using untempered words, concluded Castro. I am going by the facts. As can be seen, the polyhedron [the United States] has many dark sides. The same month, as the Six-Party Talks on North Koreas nuclear weapons program stalled over the issue of frozen assets, a statement on the North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) website also accused the United States of warmongering:
The US itself makes it plain that it has not changed its hostile policy toward the DPRK by staging the war rehearsals, which, at the slightest slip, might destroy the climate of the relaxation of tension in a mo-

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ment and throw the whole of the Korean Peninsula into the vortex of a nuclear war. The anti-DPRK war exercises of the US and South Korean warmongers seriously threaten the process of peace and reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula. The Korean nation and the world peace-loving people will never tolerate these developments.42

North Korea and Cuba have spurned the catholic embrace of USled globalization. In their rejection, they recall not only their histories but also the sober political realities of a machtpolitik, real and imagined, undergirding US universalism. Yet these enemies are not as ideal as they first appear, because their tough talk does not simply represent a rejection of all that the United States claims to stand for. Instead, they simultaneously use and defy US categories. They challenge the United States on its own terms, arguing it is they who are truly bringing freedom, democracy, and general well being to their people. It is they who are the great defenders of human rights, defined as the right to food, housing, and medicine. Until the 1990s, there was some basis to these claims.43 Unlike Islam, which can more be easily dismissed as the Other, these countries appeal to a Western tradition, socialism, and yet, they argue that they are improving and transforming it. By virtue of their existence, these countries call into question those elements of MarxismLeninism that they share with their bourgeois counterpartsideas of history of progress, of the proper stages of revolution, of what it means to be a nation. Schmitt warned that when liberal states tried to do away with the friend-enemy distinction by claiming to represent the interests of humanity, they adopted a universal concept for their own particular ends, identifying themselves with humanity so as to exclude the enemy. Thus only by suggesting that the enemy was beyond the pale could a claim to universality be maintained.44 Drawing on Schmitts work, Geoffrey Hawthorn argues that this tension has confronted liberalism with acute force since the end of the Cold War. The paradox of liberal hegemony . . . is that it is weak because it cannot convincingly be demonstrated, and in so far as it can be, threatens to undermine the principles on which it is.45 North Korea and Cuba expose this paradox: When they talk back to the United States, they do so not just in the sense of refusing to comply with its commands and directives, but in their peculiarly styled, adamant insistence they are doing things right, in their own way. Part of the talking back, however acrid or vitriolic, is a way of continuing the dialogue, and it is partly through dialogue that they hope to be able to establish normal relations with the United States.46 And yet this desire for recognition is coupled with a refusal to negate themselves in the process of becoming recognized.

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The excitable speech of the two countries also serves to highlight a political rhetoric that functions in the United States, just as in Cuba and North Korea. Critics of the Cuban government, including US Congress members seeking to end the blockade, have long argued that the blockade has empowered Castro, allowing him to lay the blame for Cubas problems elsewhere while rallying people behind him.47 Our point, however, is that what is threatening to the United States is not only the specific criticism leveled at it by Cuba or North Korea, but also the way that excitable speech operates to unmask the fundamentally ideological nature of any political discourse (be it communist, capitalist, etc.) that the United States wishes to evade and obscure in the name of universalistic values. The primary challenge is not to any particular universal value, but rather to the US claim to represent it. This unmasking does not close down discussion but rather brings issues back to the realm of the political, challenging the dichotomy of human rights versus tyranny that US discourse sets up to silence those with whom it does not agree. The dialogical nature of the relationship, however contorted or strained it may be at any given time, demonstrates how both states seem to lie outside the range of US power beyond the parameters of force and consent. They cannot be totally bought off or silenced through the various means available to US hegemony.

Ruins of Socialism North Korea and Cuba continue to exercise the fullest of their rhetorical powers in responding to and at times harassing the United States, but there is another dimension to their challenge. We would like to take off from Derridas Specters of Marx (based upon his lectures from 1993, the same year as Lakes foreign policy pronouncements). Derrida commences with lines from Hamlet, in the presence of the spirit of the father, and from the Communist Manifesto, A specter is haunting Europethe specter of communism. This, for Derrida, is a specter to come, and the haunting it accomplishes is historical but not dated: It does not proceed according to calendrical time. Derrida elaborates upon the particular disjuncture informing his analysis:
I was initially thinking of all the forms of a certain haunting obsession that seems to me to organize the dominant influence today. At a time when a new world disorder is attempting to install its neocapitalism and neo-liberalism, no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of Marxs ghosts. Hegemony still organizes the repression, and thus the confirmation of a haunting. Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony. 48

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In both cases, of the specter invoked by Marx in 19471948, the specter haunting the decrepit allies of Europe of a communism to come, and of the specter of our century, capitalism has not killed off the specter. Derrida writes:
Today, almost a century and a half later, there are many who throughout the world, seem just as worried by the specter of communism, just as convinced that what one is dealing with there is only a specter without body, without present reality, without actuality or affectivity, but this time, it is supposed to be a past specter. It was only a specter, an illusion, a phantasm, or a ghost: that is what one hears everywhere today. . . . A still worried sigh of relief: let us make sure that in the future it does not come back! At bottom, the specter is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back; in the future, said the powers of old Europe in the last century, it must not incarnate itself, either publicly or in secret. In the future, we hear everywhere today, it must not re-incarnate itself; it must not be allowed to come back since it is past.49

As it is already past, it must not be allowed to come back, and thus, the injunction, the chasing away of the specter which is in part effected via exorcism, and in part, via a performative that seeks to reassure but first of all to reassure itself by assuring itself, for nothing is less sure, that what one would like to see dead is indeed dead.50 Communism is dead. Marxism is dead. Long live capitalism! Indeed, the announcement of the death of communism is performative, but should it have to be shouted or whispered? To shout it would be to call attention to communisms latent potency, to its onetime status as contender on the global scene and a source of continuing critique. To whisper it would be to display uncertainty about its demise or to miss the chance to claim responsibility for its passing. It is not sufficient that Cuba and North Korea are struggling. The United States wants to be responsible for their disappearance. Anything less is a failure, for not only are North Korea and Cuba supposed to be dead, but they never should have existed in the first place. In Korea, US military might was supposed to take care of this country overnight. MacArthur said he could handle North Korea with one hand tied behind [his] back.51 Commanders could not believe that they had such a formidable enemy during the war. In Cuba, both the 1959 triumph of the popular movement that overthrew Fulgencio Batista and Castros later turn to communism were terrible shocks to the American people and government. Communist revolution was not supposed to happen in Cuba: Americans associated Cuba with vacations and fun. Cuba, as Louis Perez Jr. wrote, was not a country to be taken seriously.52 If the establishment of these governments challenged US Cold War triumphalism, so too has their survival and transformation troubled the

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easy narrative of an inexorable global move toward liberal market democracies. Unlike other one-party Communist-run states such as China and Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea have not overseen dramatic economic restructuring and a clear embrace of a market economy: Instead they have approached market reform with great caution. Their transformations are distinct, not only because the government controls them to a large extent, but also because they are influenced by over forty years of revolution and socialism that narrow the parameters of what these governments can do to maintain power. For instance, in Cuba, it is not simply the government that insists on preserving what it calls the achievements of the revolution, from free health care and education to low infant mortality rates. Most dissidents and Cubans outside official government structures also support the maintenance of the welfare state in Cuba. This is a challenge to the United States, where the already limited welfare state is being increasingly dismantled, but it is also to the Cuban government, which wrongly believes itself the only protector of socialism. In this sense, the governments of North Korea and Cuba are beholden to the legacies of socialism even as they have fallen far short of the promises made to their people. That Cubans and North Koreans have suffered at the hands of their own governments is not in question. However, the focus on their victimization too often comes at the expense of taking seriously the voices of those living in these two countries. For the United States to do so, however, would be to give up important ground for it would mean recognizing that the failures of North Korea and Cuba to live up to their own goals or to respond to the desires of their inhabitants do not signal the clear triumph of liberal capitalism. North Korea and Cuba occupy an important position in the USled global capitalist system. They annoy, harass, threaten, hound, and, dare it be said, haunt the United States. North Korea and Cuba are already supposed to be dead; their deaths have already been predicted and their resurrection in another body already plotted and graphed; epitaphs are ready. As rickety old ghosts in the system, the rusty-sickled specters of a socialism that refuses to finally lie down and die, North Korea and Cuba should already be dead, and yet they continue to play the role of the specter.

Notes
The authors would like to thank Aaron Belkin, Bill Gordy, Dean Hammer, Derek Hall, Jennifer Kibbe, and two anonomous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this article. 1. K. P. OReilly, Perceiving Rogue States: The Use of the Rogue State Concept by U.S. Foreign Policy Elites, Foreign Policy Analysis, 3 (2007): 295315.

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2. Authors translation. Kim Il Sung, Por la victoria total del socialismo (Havana: Editora Poltica, 1992) pp. 7071. 3. Frances Robles, President Barack Obama tells Cubas Raul Castro: Its Your Move Now, The Miami Herald, April 19, 2009. Available at: http:// www.miamiherald.com/1370/story/1007902.html 4. Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country (New York: Free Press, 2004) p. 16. 5. See, for instance, the results of a 2007 poll of 1000 randomly selected Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County in which 65 percent of respondents supported dialogue with the Cuban government (http://www.fiu.edu/~por/ Cuba8/pollresults.html). For a discussion of the diversity of the Cuban American community, see Maria Cristina Garcia, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 19591994 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 6. Anthony Lake, From Containment to Enlargement, speech given at Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, 1993. 7. Robert Litwak, Rogue States and US Foreign Policy: Containment After the Cold War (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000) pp. xiv, 3, 47. 8. Paul Hoyt, The Rogue State Image in American Foreign Policy, Global Society, 14, no. 2 (2000): 306; Noam Chomsky, Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000). 9. Miguel Garca Reyes and Mara Guadalupe Lopez de Llergo y Cornejo, Cuba despus de la era sovitica (Mexico City: Colegio de Mexico, 1997) p. 25. 10. Frank T. Fitzgerald, The Cuban Revolution in Crisis: From Managing Socialism to Managing Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994) p. 2. 11. Manuel Pastor, Jr., and Andrew Zimbalist, Cubas Economic Conundrum, NACLA Report on the Americas (Sept./Oct. 1995): 8. 12. Jorge I. Domnguez, The Cuban Economy at the Start of the TwentyFirst Century: An Introductory Analysis, in Jorge I. Domnguez, Omar Eveleny Prez Villanueva, and Lorena Barberia, eds., The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 2004), p. 5. 13. Indicative of the dimensions of that decline are North Koreas trade trends: between 1990 and 1998, according to reports by its trading partners, the DPRKs international purchases and sales of merchandise had fallen by more than half. Nicholas Eberstadt, The End of North Korea (Washington, DC: AIE Press, 1999), pp. 78. 14. Marcus Noland, Between Collapse and Revival: A Reinterpretation of the North Korean Economy, paper presented at the conference on Economic Development in North Korea and Global Partnership, South Korea, March 2001. 15. Nancy San Martin, US Treasury OFAC Has 6 Times More Personnel on Cuba than Bin Laden, Miami Herald, May 1, 2004, available at http:// havanajournal.com/politics/entry/us_treasury_ofac_has_6_times_more_per sonnel_on_cuba_than _bin_laden/ 16. US Department of State, Country Reports on Terrorism 2007, available at http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/2007/index.htm. State Sponsors of Terrorism Overview available at http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/2007/103711 .htm. 17. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, The Nomination of Condoleezza Rice to Be Secretary of State, 18 January 2005.

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18. Jacques Derrida, The Last of the Rogue States: The Democracy to Come, Opening in Two Turns, South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (Spring/ Summer 2004): 324325. 19. For a recent more nuanced example of the genre, see Andrei Lankovs memo, The FP Memo: How to Topple Kim Jong Il, Foreign Policy (March/April 2007). 20. Leon Sigal, Rogue Concepts, Harvard International Review 2, no. 2 (2000): 12. 21. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002) p. 340. 22. Gorge W. Bush, State of the Union Address, Available at www.whitehouse .gov/news/releases/2002. 23. Christopher Marquis, Powell, Denouncing Crackdown, Calls Cuba Aberration in the West, New York Times, 29 April 2003. 24. Bureau of Western Hemispheric Affairs, Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba (Washington, DC: US Department of State, 2004). 25. Otto J. Reich, Latin Americas Terrible TwoFidel Castro and Hugo Chavez Constitute an Axis of Evil, National Review (11 April 2005): 34. 26. Louis Prez Jr., Fear and Loathing of Fidel Castro: Sources of US Policy towards Cuba, Journal of Latin American Studies 34, no. 2 (2002): 227. 27. The Day After, Foreign Policy (Nov./Dec. 2003,): 32. 28. Nicolas Righetti, The Last Paradise: North Korea (New York: Umbrage, 2003). 29. Ibid. 30. Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Three Decades of Studies on the Cuban Revolution: Progress, Problems, and the Future, in Damian Fernndez, ed., Cuban Studies since the Revolution (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992) p. 25. 31. The issue of succession is important, but discussions of transitions are often part of the pathologization of these countries and represent an unwillingness to recognize that changes have already begun and that the legacy of the systems cannot be reduced to the figures of Fidel Castro and Kim Jong Il. 32. See Defense Intelligence Agency, The Cuban Threat to U.S. National Security (1997 [cited July 5, 2005]), available from www.defenselink.mil.pubs/ cubarpt.htm; US Department of State, Background Note: Cuba, available at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2886.htm 33. For a discussion of North Koreas nuclear capabilities, see, for example, V. Cha and D. Kang, Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Selig Harrison, The Second Bush Administration and the Korean Peninsula, 30 March1 April 2005; Selig Harrison, Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 34. See US Dept. of State, Country Report on Terrorism, note 16. 35. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) p. 37. 36. Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2002) p. 106. 37. Leo Strauss, Notes on Carl Schmitt, in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, note 35, p. 84. 38. Washington Post, April 28, 2005. 39. Kim Jong Il, Let Us Carry Out President Kim Il Sungs Instructions for National Reunification, 4 August 1997. 40. For the official US defense of these measures, see US Department of State, Statement by James Cason, Chief of Mission, US Interests Section,

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About Cuban Government Threats to Holiday Lights and Decorations, available at www.state.gov/p/wha/rls/rm/39815.htm 41. Fidel Castro, The Internationalization of Genocide. Available at http://www.granma.cu/INGLES/abril/mier4/14refexf.html; More than Three Billion People in the World Condemned to Premature Death from Hunger and Thirst. Available at http://www.granma.cu/INGLES/2007/marzo/ juev29/14reflex.html 42. Joint Military Exercises Reveal Anti-DPRK Policy, Available at http:// www.kcna.co.jp/index-e.html 43. See Jim Lobe, Learn from Cuba, Says World Bank, InterPress News Service, 30 April 2001 and Cumings, North Korea, note 4, p. ix. Cuba still performs fairly well according to these indicators. 44. When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent. At the expense of its opponent, it tries to identify itself with humanity in the same way as one can misuse peace, justice, progress, and civilization in order to claim these as ones own and to deny the same to the enemy. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, note 35, p. 54. 45. Geoffrey Hawthorne, Liberalism since the Cold War: An Enemy to Itself, Review of International Studies 25 (1999): 145160, at 160. 46. For recent papers on normalization of relations between North Korea and other states see: http://www.uskoreainstitute.org/research/publications/ wps/index.htm. 47. For instance, see Representative Jeff Flakes comments in Will U.S. Trade with Cuba Promote Freedom or Subsidize Tyranny? Featuring Rep. Jeff Flake, R. Arizona; Philip Peters, Lexington Institute; and Dennis K. Hays, Cuban American National Foundation, paper presented at the Cato Institute Policy Forum, The Cato Institute, F. A. Hayek Auditorium, Washington DC, 25 July 2002. 48. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 4, 47. 49. Ibid., p. 39. 50. Ibid., p. 48. 51. Cited in Cumings, North Korea, note 4, pp. 89. 52. Prez Jr., Fear and Loathing of Fidel Castro, note 26, p. 231.