This chapter examines America’s quest for a comprehensive missile defense system in the post-Cold War era. Major weapons systems – especially those that come with a high price tag – require a successful political coalition that supports the initial research and future deployment of particular weapons systems over possible alternatives. The chapter shows how political agents who were supportive of missile defense succeeded in keeping the costly and highly contentious endeavor of creating a shield of invulnerability from an attack with ballistic missiles alive as the ‘holy grail’ of the US defense policy agenda. Key to this effort was how the changed external security environment was reinterpreted as fluid, fast-changing, and dangerous. Rather than the end of Cold War hostilities reducing the perceived need for ballistic missile defense, which seemed a likely outcome in the early 1990s, the ‘uncertainty doctrine’ served to strengthen the rationale for developing a comprehensive system.

This chapter explores how the principle that America’s security rests upon global military supremacy – achieved through the ability to fight wars on multiple fronts – emerged as a strategic consensus in the aftermath of the Cold War. It dissects and analyzes the bargaining dynamics within the US defense establishment and reveals how reorienting the foundations of US defense strategy towards rogue states as the primary source of uncertainty and insecurity went hand-in-hand with defining the maintenance of overwhelming US hard power as an important end in itself. This facilitated a creative recombination of known policy elements and frames, leading to ‘new’ window dressing for strategic models that closely resembled Cold War templates.

This chapter unpacks the book’s two-fold concern with ‘narrative’: The study of narrative is the empirical focal point for exploring US defense policymaking in the context of the end of the Cold War and, developing a narrative mode of knowing, it is also the methodological cornerstone of how this is done. Looking more closely at the process of reconstituting meaning in relation to the international security environment after a dominant storyline has suddenly become invalid gives a snapshot of the narrative politics that precede the strategic use of security stories to shape political agendas and behavior. This shifts analytic attention beyond narrative purpose and intention toward discursive processes of forming and becoming, in which materiality intra-acts with narrative development. As the chapter demonstrates, a narrative analysis is a way of understanding (inter)national politics that allows us to study security in motion rather than through static outcomes.

This chapter provides a comprehensive account of the rise of America’s preoccupation with the problem of rogue states in the US defense policy community from the late-1980s onwards. In contrast to most scholarship on rogue states, this account departs from both a realist epistemology and the treatment of rogue states as an ‘objective’ problem category. Instead, it shows in granular detail how the construction of a new post-Cold War security narrative centered on ‘rogue states’ was the result of a politically-driven discursive process that grew out of interagency bargaining dynamics, status quo interests, and the absorption of competing security narratives. This provided the discursive foundation for defining the post-Cold War era as dangerous because of heightened uncertainty, which in turn established a rationale for preserving major elements of the status quo in US defense policy and neutralized calls for deeper cuts in US defense spending.

This chapter introduces the reader to how narrative politics shaped US hard power after the Cold War. It reveals a fundamental problem with claims of significant and sustained reductions in US defense spending during the 1990s: the highly selective use of data. This creates the illusion of a starkly reduced US post-Cold defense burden, which equates to less than nine months of the annual US defense budget for 1989. A critical review of conventional explanations for the case of the missing peace dividend shows they rely on mixed evidence at best. As the chapter explains, a moment of rupture such as the end of the Cold War should be seen as a permissive condition for political agents not only to innovate at the level of policy but also to push ahead on the current path, to maintain the status quo despite the changing context. Peeling back the layers of perceived transformation which nurture our understanding of a radical break from the past allows us to see lingering path dependencies and residue. The chapter establishes the centrality of a narrative approach to understanding the course and direction of US post-Cold War defense policy.

This chapter ties the book’s key findings and its main arguments together. It reminds the reader why the analysis in the book has not told the familiar tale of how the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War ended, but the lesser known story of what happened during the period of systemic transition that began in the late 1980s and extended throughout the 1990s. The chapter articulates the book’s central argument that the ‘uncertainty doctrine’ has become firmly embedded in contemporary US defense policy. It draws together the wider lessons of the empirical analysis, and underscores that examining the processes surrounding critical turning points improves our understanding of the impact of the past on contemporary political developments and on future political possibilities. The chapter also considers the broader implications of the symbiotic relationship between changing security policy dynamics in the United States, political battles over defense priorities, the construction of security narratives, and our understanding of international security events.