Vice President Cheney’s sarcastic reference to overseas contingency operations and manmade disasters and his caution that changing terms of such things as the Global War on Terror does not make the problem go away reminds of discussions at the end of the Clinton administration, when Madeleine Albright began calling rogue regimes “states of concern” or, for that matter, George W. Bush deciding that he could not identify the threat of Islamist ideology as such.

New terms did not neuter Iranian or North Korean ambitions or mitigate al-Qaeda’s behavior. For my own book project on the history of U.S. engagement toward rogue regimes, I’ve been reading Charles L. Pritchard’s Failed Diplomacy about Bush administration policy toward North Korea. It’s not my favorite book on North Korea, but one thing which it highlights and which grates on me is the tendency of diplomats to consider moral clarity in U.S. rhetoric as corrosive. The Axis of Evil speech is amplified, but almost daily rhetoric outpourings of bile by our adversaries are ignored. Alas, it seems Obama is channeling such diplomats, even though their assertions do not stand up to the weight of evidence.