Democratic peace as global errand
America’s post-Cold War foreign policy jeremiad
Focusing on the foreign policy discourse of George H. W. Bush and William Clinton, I examine the role the American jeremiad played in conceptualizing the geopolitical change initiated by the ending of the Cold War. I identify “extending the democratic peace” as the nation’s post-Cold War “errand” and argue that this global mission represented the contemporary “re-dedication” of American policy to the nation’s “divine cause.” I demonstrate that a key issue facing the nation was whether the U.S. would reap the benefits of its Cold War victory by extending its political-economic system globally or whether it would turn inward and, thereby, give rein of the future to the forces of “anarchy” and chaos.” As with earlier renditions of the jeremiad, the post-Cold War variant turned this liminal moment into a “mode of socialization” (Bercovitch 2012, 25) by deploying the concept of democratic peace to legitimate an interventionist foreign policy.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Analytic Framework
- 3.The Post-Cold War Jeremiad
- 3.1The errand continues: Democratic peace as global mission
- 3.2Liminality and the new frontier
- 3.3Threat as promise: Revitalizing the errand
- 4.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
Speeches analyzed
-
References
This article is currently available as a sample article.
References
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Dunmire, Patricia L.
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‘America’s most precious resource’: The future in American national identity and foreign policy.
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