The war against Iran threatens to end the clerical regime in Tehran as well as an entire category of international security threats. After the Cold War, U.S. strategy made a priority of threats from “rogue states.” Since then, presidents have largely succeeded in hunting down and eliminating these pariahs. Donald Trump has the opportunity to finish them off.
In 1993, James Woolsey, Bill Clinton’s nominee to direct the Central Intelligence Agency, said in his confirmation hearing: “We have slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.” The U.S. faced new enemies: regional autocratic powers pursuing weapons of mass destruction, sponsoring terrorism, abusing human rights, and flouting international law.
Every presidential administration from Bill Clinton’s to Donald Trump’s has vowed to address threats from “backlash,” “rogue,” “outlaw” and “pariah” states. The Clinton administration briefly euphemized them as “states of concern,” while George W. Bush dubbed three of them an “axis of evil.”
The 1990s and 2000s brought a long list of rogues: Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, the Kim regime in North Korea, the Assad regime in Syria, Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, the communists in Cuba, the Chavistas in Venezuela and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Since then, the U.S. has maintained a steady—if haphazard—de facto campaign of toppling anti-American dictators.
A North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign and subsequent protests ousted Milosevic in 2000. He died at the Hague before his trial ended.
In 2003 the U.S. led an international coalition to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein, who was later tried in an Iraqi court and hanged.
Gadhafi fell with the help of a NATO bombing campaign. His own people killed him in the streets in 2011.
Al-Bashir, who oversaw the Darfur genocide, was ousted in a coup d’état and imprisoned in 2019.
Bashar al-Assad fought a nearly 14-year civil war that ended when rebels toppled his regime in 2024 with the help of U.S. aid and military strikes.
Contrary to the popular notion that America’s post-Cold War grand strategy was a failure, Washington has shown a knack for toppling dictators.
Some consider these operations failures because they left chaos in their wake, but that misses the point. For years, these rogues dominated the president’s daily intelligence brief. Now that they are defanged, these countries’ remaining afflictions don’t threaten Americans or occupy the attention of senior U.S. national security officials.
North Korea is the exception that proves the rule. Bill Clinton missed an opportunity to strike it in 1994, and now the regime is a major nuclear power.
To the surprise of many, Mr. Trump is now emerging as the most prolific deposer of despots. In January he authorized a daring military raid to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and is transforming the remnants of the Chavista regime into a U.S. proxy.
He appears to be following the same plan against Cuba, using economic pressure to coerce the communists into releasing political prisoners and reforming their economy. Mr. Trump said he believes Cuba is “going to fall pretty soon” and that Washington will succeed in a “friendly takeover” of the country.
The biggest prize is Iran. For decades, it posed one of the greatest threats to U.S. national security. Through a bold military campaign, the U.S. and Israel have slain much of the country’s top leadership, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and degraded its military capabilities. The regime may fall in the coming weeks, and even if it doesn’t, it will be too weak to pose a serious threat for years to come.
Mr. Trump is on the verge of eliminating the world’s rogue states just as new threats emerge, from the return of great-power rivalry to a disruptive technological revolution. But this change also gives the U.S. an opportunity to leave behind the national-security problems of decades past.
Mr. Kroenig is vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a professor at Georgetown. He was a commissioner on the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States from 2022-23.