With his meaty embrace of dictators and confounding repudiation of historic allies, Donald Trump has radically remade the world order, and America’s place within it. And yet, certain traditions prevail—particularly the Washingtonian habit of adopting pithy neologisms to define administration’s geopolitical rivals. George W. Bush coined the “axis of evil”—a play on the old World War II Axis powers—to insinuate a sinister alliance between Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Barack Obama referred to a “network of death” to describe Islamic extremists spanning Iraq and Syria. The Trump administration, not to be outdone, has invented its own terminology to name and shame those regimes it has deemed the greatest threats to the national interest. The only trouble is, they can’t seem to agree on exactly what that name should be, or what villains should be included.

Months ago, National Security Adviser John Bolton, a Cold Warrior to the core, termed Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua a “troika of tyranny” and also a “triangle of terror,” denouncing the terrible triumvirate as “the impetus of enormous regional instability, and the genesis of a sordid cradle of Communism in the Western Hemisphere.” Now, Vice President Mike Pence has offered another alternative, confirming the general thrust of the Trump Doctrine but expanding the enemies list to include some classic Bush-era favorites.

“Beyond our global competitors, the United States faces a wolf pack of rogue states,” Pence said Wednesday during a speech, listing Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea as America’s biggest foes. “No shared ideology or objective unites our competitors and adversaries except this one: they seek to overturn the international order that the United States has upheld for more [than] half a century.”

Foreign-policy critics had a field day. “Still to come: the Cabal of Crazies, Circle of Scoundrels, League of Extraordinary Villains,” tweeted Georgetown professor Ali Vaez. “‘Wolf Pack of Rogue States’ opened for Megadeth at the Garden in 89,” joked political analyst Jeff Greenfield. At The American Conservative, writer Daniel Larison described the Pence-ism as “another stupid hawkish phrase” untethered from the reality of foreign policy. “The one thing that the five states Pence lists really do have in common is that they are all much weaker states that pose little or no threat to the United States,” Larison wrote. “Their ability to ‘overturn the international order’ is practically nil, and it isn’t even certain that most of them desire that outcome. If North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are our main adversaries, we are as secure as can be and we have very little to worry about.”

The countries left off the list are equally notable. There’s no mention of Syria, where Bashar al-Assad remains in power despite evidence that he has used chemical weapons against his own people. China, the U.S. economic rival that has imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Muslims in re-education camps, is also off the list. So too is Russia, the Ukraine-invading, spy-poisoning, election-meddling former Soviet superpower that has nonetheless wheedled its way into Trump’s heart.

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