America as a Rogue State

In 2015 I made two trips to Guantanamo while writing my history of concentration camps. I went to observe the mass detention of suspects without trial, which had been going on there for over a decade at that point. It seemed important to understand how Gitmo compared to the other places I was writing about.

The first visit, I went to a pretrial hearing of the five 9/11 suspects. The second time I visited the detention facilities there. I interviewed a number of people who had official roles at various points: the chief prosecutor in the 9/11 case, the defendants’ attorneys, and those who had been interrogators or guards.

One person I talked to not long after that was Mark Fallon, a career NCIS agent, who said something that stuck with me. As NCIS chief of counterintelligence operations for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, he’d been part of the early interrogation program at Gitmo. He protested the U.S. turn to torture in interrogations there internally, later condemning it in public and writing a book, Unjustifiable Means.

Fallon told me that after 9/11, with the turn toward black sites and torture around the world, the U.S. had become a rogue state. And because we had brought those secret, illegal interrogation sites into being around the world, America had not only became a rogue state, but had pulled other states into that orbit. He thought the U.S. would remain a rogue state—and the danger of doing even worse things would remain—until there was full accountability for the program.

Hearing the U.S. referred to as a rogue state by a career law-enforcement agent made an impression. With Trump coming back to power and less likely to be checked by his staff this time, it’s worth considering the ways in which he’s poised to capitalize on the abuses authorized by prior presidents.

In wishing for generals more loyal to him than to the state, for example, Trump seems to want to take things even further than the human rights violations inflicted after 9/11. He aspires to be a rogue president of a rogue state, ready to smash things at home and around the world. He’s talked repeatedly about being a dictator on day one, about bombing Mexico, about weakening or abandoning NATO, and seems to be planning to force Ukraine into concessions advantageous to Russia.

I want to address what Trump is up to at home and abroad, why the U.S. is especially vulnerable to what he’s doing, and what we can do to slow this movement deeper into rogue state territory.

The global war on terror 

The global war on terror has seeded or phenomenally worsened rogue U.S. actions worldwide. In the wake of 9/11, the U.S. attacked Afghanistan, where the ruling party—the Taliban—had sheltered Osama bin Laden. We launched operations around the world; mass arrests, black sites, and torture followed.

Everything became possible in the name of fighting terrorism. This surrender to using terrorists’ methods in the attempt to fight terrorism is one of the classic models for how a country devolves into running concentration camps or building places like Gitmo.

In the twentieth century, mass civilian detention camps were often seen as a justifiable defensive measure when faced with guerilla forces. Of course these camps were outside the law, but they were understood to be necessary.

“It is in fact impossible,” wrote High Commissioner of British Malaya Sir Henry Gurney in 1949, “to maintain the rule of law and fight terrorism effectively at the same time.”

Fallon had told me that in the early days of interrogations at Gitmo, he started to notice other interrogation teams had been at work in the same spaces, and he saw signs of interrogation tactics that were disturbing, like duct tape and cinderblocks. He pushed back and began raising questions about detainee treatment.

He refused to resort to these new methods. In time, he would be frozen out, as were others who protested. But the program continued, adopting torture tactics as approved interrogation tactics, and paying two psychologists $81 million to develop what seems very much like a torture program.

In the wake of 9/11, the world had tremendous sympathy for the US. It’s one of those moments in our history when things could have gone very differently. But the U.S. embraced an agenda of maximalist punishment and mindless revenge. We did the very thing that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were baiting us into—the thing that would help them the most in the end.

After 9/11, U.S. rogue actions multiplied. In addition to resorting to kidnapping and torture, America launched a preemptive war that destabilized the Persian Gulf and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Presidents as a problem

After George W. Bush’s second term, Obama removed torture from the government’s approved toolkit, but he decided not to punish or prosecute those who had authorized or committed it. Fallon described the transition from one administration to the next as “Bush sanctioned torture; Obama gave it sanctuary.”

Obama did direct steps be taken to close Gitmo—though he didn’t burn political capital with a Congress aggressively uninterested in helping him do it. When I was at Guantanamo nearly a decade ago, interviewing the rear admiral in charge of detention, I asked how quickly the facility might be closed to comply with Obama’s directive, and he was caught short by his own laughter before he could stop himself.

These precedents give us a history, and this history made us more vulnerable. The abuse targeting Muslim detainees, whom Fallon described to as being mostly “not just low-value detainees but no-value detainees” left a lot of room for future presidential candidates to endorse torture.

The day after winning the November 2016 election, Trump included waterboarding as one of the top five priorities of his incoming administration. In the Republican primaries months earlier, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz suggested that rather than emptying Gitmo, they wanted to send more Muslim extremists there for waterboarding. Even retired general Wesley Clark said in 2015 that there should be internment camps for disloyal, radicalized Americans. This is the language of a rogue state.

Biden curbed many of the worst excesses of the Trump administration on the international stage. But he has continued to supply vast quantities of arms for the Israeli response to the horrific October 7 terror attack, long after it became clear that tens of thousands of women and children have been killed and are continuing to be killed. Biden is not helping the nation retreat from the rogue status we cemented with the global war on terror.

As U.S. Senator George Helmy said Monday on the Senate floor about the crisis, “Do [Israel’s] actions, intent on limiting aid into Gaza and the West Bank, taken under the pretense of security operations, comply with international humanitarian laws and norms? Are these the actions we should expect from one of our closest Democratic allies in the world?”

Not the same

Still, I think that those who say Trump is no different or worse than Harris or Biden are mistaken. Many of the worst U.S. presidents could be threatened and pressured to accommodate norms on a number of fronts.

Even the Bush administration tried to provide a veneer of legality to what it was doing, out of fear of that kind of pressure. John Yoo in the Office of Legal Counsel and others gave legal advice that justified torture. The Bush administration did not want the U.S. to lose its allies; they didn’t want the country to be seen as a rogue state.

Trump, however, takes offense at the any notion of constraint, publicly chafing under every legal limitation, international or domestic. Despite the vast powers of the U.S. presidency, he’s expressed a desire to shoot protesters, jail political rivals, and weaponize libel laws against journalists.

Recent reports suggest he wants to push heavily to keep the U.S. Senate from exercising its constitutional role in deciding whether to approve appointees to major cabinet positions, including the Secretary of Defense, in charge of the U.S. military. His nominee has many signs (including a literal tattoo) of being a right-wing extremist.

And to be clear, Trump’s actions during his first administration already had rogue aspects, going against international law. His obscene border policy with the deliberate punitive spectacle of family separations not only didn’t comply with law, it instead clearly aimed to defy it. Yet unlike Bush or Nixon, Trump doesn’t try to hide what he wants to do.

In his first administration Trump was hemmed in by those around him, which kept the rule of law partially intact. His actions to encourage insurrection on January 6, 2021, however, identified him clearly as a rogue actor bent on upending any accountability, as well as government itself.

He was later impeached, twice. But like George W. Bush after the excesses of 9/11 and invading Iraq, he was reelected. Voters continued to fail to extract the country from a state of disgrace.

This time out, Trump’s nominations indicate wholesale contempt for our institutions: Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense, RFK Jr. at Health and Human Services, and Matt Gaetz (who left Congress days ago under investigation for sexual contact with a minor) at the Department of Justice.

These are not qualified or serious people; they’re cartoons. The appointment of such creatures to high places is common scenery in a rogue state. It brings to mind Vladimir Putin making his caterer a paramilitary warlord.

Trump has suggested to his followers that maybe Americans won’t have to vote again. He has joked about a third term. He admires rogue states or leaders who have tried to overthrow or subvert democratic governance. His supporters and allies include Vladimir Putin, former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro, and Viktor Orbán of Hungary.

In a second Trump administration, there will be much less pressure from his new cabinet to contain his rogue tendencies. The people he aims to bring in this time have embraced his agenda.

The domestic sphere shapes the international sphere, and vice versa. War creates veterans, deportations involve other countries, pandemics don’t recognize borders.

Climate, too, is global. The U.S. pulling out of climate change agreements is an effective way to sabotage the process for everyone. We’ve been a prime mover in the IPCC process in the past. The U.S. is the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the largest producer of oil and natural gas. While there is still a lot the world will be able to do—and some countries will choose to take action—in the absence of the U.S., many won’t.

There are costs to all of this, inside and outside the country. If a country acts as a rogue state abroad, it tends toward similar harms against its own people. And even that harm has repercussions. Mass deportations will invite similar programs by other governments, exacerbating crises around the world

In Chile, I interviewed former detainees who had survived torture and forever resented Nixon and Kissinger for helping to put their country under a brutal dictatorship that saw thousands murdered and many more imprisoned. One person I spoke with said that some of his fellow activists still admired the ideals of American democracy. They just wanted America to live up to them. A United States that no longer even pretends to promote democracy, even as virtue signaling, actively invites more rogue behavior from all corners of the globe.

And rogue actions on the part of America have already been replicated around the world, in the language and programs used by Russia and China to suppress civilian populations in the name of terrorism. If Trump allies himself directly with leaders and states that embrace terror, the brakes will be off for a lot of other countries. When the U.S. deliberately undermines its public standards—even the ones it has historically failed to meet—it helps them crumble around the world.

Fallon on Trump

Given where the country is at now, I reached out to Mark Fallon again. When we spoke last week, I asked him what he thinks of our current moment, and whether America is still a rogue state.

He noted that the cabinet nominees put forward so far are in many cases the negation of the agencies Trump is inviting them to run. Each one exemplifies the opposite of the values of the institutions he wants them to lead.

“These nominees appear to be those who will destroy or hinder the internal workings of government,” he said, “which even Al Qaeda failed to do.”

One problem, he notes, is that after a country surrenders ground on the rule of law, it’s hard to find a way back. “Once you open that door, it opens the door for other people who will do worse.”

Shamelessness

If accountability will be key in these next four years, a big concern is Trump’s tendency to target journalists. He’s already filed a litany of lawsuits against everyone from CBS to The New York Times and the publishing behemoth Penguin Random House—and those are just the recent ones.

Typically these suits don’t make it very far, but as Trump works to further degrade our court system, he may get luckier. And all the legal noise can play an intimidating role. Moreover, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—whose opinions regularly blurt out the quiet part of the reactionary agenda—last year called for ripping up libel law protections for the press

Another big issue in covering Trump is that most big news outlets are themselves institutions that have historically have taken the lead in covering the government. They have their own traditions and stance in relation to political officials, especially the president.

Even as their own journalists have sometimes broken key stories of wrongdoing by individuals, big news organizations themselves don’t seem to know how to cover an administration acting entirely outside the rule of law, let alone one led by a person as shameless as Donald Trump.

We saw this previously, after 9/11, when Judith Miller got the case for war against Iraq drastically wrong. She replied to her critics by saying it was wrong to expect her to be an analyst: “My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal.”

We’ll see more appalling reporting like that under Trump, but there’s already a more insidious side to how Trump and his allies are being portrayed. The upcoming Washington Post Women’s Summit features Lara Trump and Kellyanne Conway. One of the other featured speakers is Democratic former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, underlining the idea that the new administration is just like any other. This kind of pop marketing will go a long way toward papering over extralegal actions that may unfold during Trump’s second administration.

This same strange gloss or soft focus is put on everything. Naive (or cynical) opinion pieces proffer “maybe RFK Jr. has a point about fluoride” debating points, all in defense of a man seemingly bent on exposing millions to contagious diseases.

NPR suggested RFK Jr. wants to tackle chronic illnesses and to make America healthy again. His actual track record includes medical recommendations in American Samoa that led to the death of 83 people, many of them children.

State-sponsored bullshit

Just before the 2020 election, Mark Fallon co-wrote a piece for Psychology Today that identifies Trump as a bullshitter and warns of the risk of state-sponsored bullshit. The piece mentions moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s argument about bullshit—that it’s worse than lying. The idea is that bullshit is phony. The bullshitter isn’t even invested in truth or falsity enough to care which is real. They just want their bluff to work.

Fallon suggested to me that this lack of an anchor to any principles might be a way to turn Trump against his worst programs. On issues where his supporters have expressed displeasure, Trump himself has shifted to accommodate them.

His need to be adored is intense. He was for the vaccine (or at least taking credit for it) before he was against it (or sort of against it). On abortion, he himself appointed the justices who made it possible to overturn Roe. But he’s spoken out both sides of his mouth on this issue in ways that reinforce his lack of any moral opinion at all. Faced with massive displeasure from his base or big shifts in public opinion, he may well abandon some of his current positions.

Push back

How can we reckon with this rogue-state bullshit that’s headed our way, a legacy of decades—even centuries—of America’s failures, of which Trump seems to epitomize all the worst aspects?

Faced with the introduction of torture into interrogations two decades ago, Fallon stood up in that moment, and told his subordinates not to take unlawful orders from anyone. He told them that they would be accountable in the long run for whatever they did.

I asked if it had really mattered that he pushed back, given that afterward he was pushed out, and given that torture continued and did tremendous harm.

Yes, he said, it had mattered. There were places in which torture was not used in interrogation because people stood up. There were teams that might have turned to it but didn’t. The people who refused couldn’t stop the flood, but they diverted some of it.

Just as important, he suggested, was the public stance against torture so many took, exposing the unlawful actions they knew about or had witnessed. Public exposure is accountability and puts a marker down. It can play a role in changing public opinion, in establishing accurate history, and in future prosecutions.

A stand in Oklahoma

Most of us will never be in a position to intervene to try to stop a secret torture program. But there will be a lot of people who will be able to take meaningful stands. In Oklahoma the state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters worked mightily earlier this year to develop a call for books for use in school that seemed designed to preferentially favor Trump Bibles.

He made a video about his new Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism and last week tried to make it required viewing for students in every school, even instructing local superintendents to forward it to parents.

Superintendents in seven school districts refused. And the state attorney general’s office has said that there is no law that can force them to follow Walters’s directive.

While it’s not a torture program, it’s a type of unconstitutional and unethical activity—a furthering of propaganda that’s important to stop. In these minor battles, it’s often possible to defy power. Small standoffs can help keep laws intact and head off worse actions.

Over the next four years, many of us may come face to face with situations in which we can draw a line and push back against unlawful or unethical orders, or at least refuse to participate in carrying them out.

Before January 20

Other actions you can take preemptively include pressuring your elected representatives on the state and national level. Find out their stances on the issues that matter to you, Praise them for good stances, pressure them for their cowardly ones (and encourage others to, as well).

Another way we can help deal with the journalism crisis is to support small and mid-sized independent outlets that will not have the institutional blinders that can make reporting from the large outlet so frustrating. They’re less likely to present as one big institution interpreting another big institution, and won’t treat the administration with gravitas. They’ll have an easier time calling bullshit.

Newsletters like this one can help keep you informed, but it’s critical to also support beat reporters following events day to day and investigating abuses. You don’t have to subject yourself to horror stories minute by minute or faint every time Trump makes a threat. But you need actual factual news sources from people on the ground.

The abuelas

I think a lot about the grandmothers from Argentina, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, and how, under dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, they began protesting in the square in front of the presidential offices, demanding answers about their disappeared children and their grandchildren that had been taken away or kidnapped after birth.

Even under dictatorship, the junta couldn’t shoot those grandmothers, though it disappeared three of the founders. Forty years later, they’ve managed to help in finding more than a hundred of those children.

The dictatorships in Chile and Argentina had ended long before I went to South America for research in January 2016. Yet there were trials underway in Buenos Aires during my visit, continuing to bring members of the Argentinian military to account for the Operation CONDOR program central to torture and disappearances in six South American countries in the 1970s and 1980s. The U.S. provided extensive support to the dictators involved.

A guilty verdict was announced just months after I left—four decades after the junta first seized power. And last year in Chile, the Supreme Court confirmed judgments against 22 members of the Directorate of National Intelligence for kidnappings and murders associated with Operation Condor. In both cases, the U.S. had given extensive assistance to the dictators involved.

The road back has not been easy for Argentina or Chile, and each country still has deep problems. But accountability is possible. Standing up for what’s right, refusing to participate in what isn’t, preserving true history, and sometimes even prosecuting criminals are how we can put these ghosts to bed.

A final point I want to be sure to make is that the rule of law is necessary but not sufficient. Rule of law allowed slavery; it allowed Jim Crow; it allowed indigenous dispossession and for women to be denied the vote. Many horrible things have been legal. But when the rule of law is on the side of justice, there’s room to insist on it whenever Trump takes rogue actions domestically or internationally or both.

I said last week about the mass deportation plan that the incoming administration doesn’t necessarily plan on running a legal program at all. But that shouldn’t stop us from using existing laws as a stick to hit it with. It’s a weapon against Trump’s wish for unchecked power, and against those who want to support him. If we can’t stop everything, we can stem the tide and build a future where we begin reeling the country back in from being a rogue state.

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