The United States provides limited direct support to its citizens abroad, but provides significant indirect support, via a global order in which capitalism, and US businesses in particular, can thrive. Historically, driven by laissez-faire ideological commitments and a limited welfare state at home, the US has rarely and only reluctantly organized or offered significant assistance when its citizens abroad have been in distress. However, mobilization by hostage families and advocacy organizations has forced the US to take a more active role in recent years, especially in prominent cases. With a vast security, diplomatic, and intelligence apparatus at its disposal to conduct matters of state, the US does not rely on citizens abroad to conduct foreign policy. It has sometimes engaged in repression of dissenting citizens through travel controls, and it has subjected citizens and others to significant surveillance. Although US citizens in distress abroad often receive limited direct assistance, US businesses can, in contrast, avail themselves of robust federal and state government aid for their commercial activities overseas – in line with US interests and ideology.

At the end of the Cold War, the United States came to pursue a policy of “liberal primacy” that would maintain America’s hegemonic status while expanding the liberal institutions that constituted the postwar international order. At least three important, long-standing questions persist about liberal primacy. First, was liberal primacy consistent with, or a radical departure from, US strategy during the Cold War? Second, how did the United States come to embrace primacy as a central objective of its foreign policy in the post-Cold War period? Finally, why did the United States choose specific strategies of expansion, especially its decision to enlarge NATO, rather than pursue other options like Partnership for Peace? We suggest that focusing on the legitimation of US foreign policy can shed light on these questions. Over the decades, US leaders have consistently invoked familiar liberal concepts and tropes to justify US foreign policy. From a legitimation perspective, there is much more continuity than change between Cold War and post-Cold War US foreign policy. We argue liberal legitimation made the post-Cold War strategy of primacy palatable both at home and abroad. Finally, liberal legitimating language bolstered the proponents of NATO expansion, clearing the path for expansionist policies.

The conventional view is that a dominant Cold War narrative took shape in the late 1940s. Lasting around two decades, it unraveled during the Vietnam War, and it failed to re-emerge even as détente flickered in the mid 1970s. Although intellectuals and activists began to rebel against Cold War orthodoxy by the end of the 1950s, scholars and contemporary observers alike identified Vietnam as “the acid that dissolved the postwar foreign policy consensus.” A minority, however, believes there to have been no substantial change throughout the post-1945 period. Such opposed stances persist because we lack systematic evidence regarding what the consensus was, when it consolidated, and when it collapsed. Yet, a shared public narrative is necessarily observable. The evidence I have gathered suggests that there was an authoritative Cold War narrative that defined the boundaries of legitimate politics in the United States, but that its content and dynamics were quite different from the usual account.

What was the Cold War consensus?

The Cold War consensus was a dominant narrative to which American elites – from policymakers to pundits to even professors – felt compelled to adhere in their public pronouncements, regardless of their private qualms. This is what Leslie Gelb meant when he blamed the consensus for driving the United States into the Vietnam fiasco; he knew many Washington insiders had severe misgivings about key pillars of the consensus and its application to Southeast Asia, but he also saw few willing to give public voice to their private dissent. Despite persistent doubts at the highest levels of government that global Communism was “a highly coordinated, conspiratorial, malevolent force” and that local Communists were mere ciphers doing Moscow's bidding – to the point that John Lewis Gaddis has claimed that no US statesman ever really “believed in the existence of an international communist monolith” – rare was the policymaker who openly challenged this representation of global Communism before the early 1960s. They could not say otherwise if they wished to be taken seriously, or so they thought. As a dominant narrative, the Cold War consensus limited the range of policy options that could be legitimately articulated: Riga and Yalta, to employ Daniel Yergin's famous categories, were both approaches within the consensus.

The Terror narrative served as the organizing axis of US debate on national security for a decade. One might have expected it to have met its end in the sands of Iraq. The Bush administration had sold the Iraq War by binding it tightly into the War on Terror, and setbacks in Iraq might have reflected poorly on, and perhaps even delegitimized, the Terror narrative. This outcome would have been consistent with the theoretical conventional wisdom. Because inertia is a powerful force in policy and in the institutions, discourses, and ideas that underlie it, we tend to think that only large-scale shocks produce change. Significant unexpected failures, as in Iraq, unsettle settled minds and discredit dominant ideas. In their absence, and certainly in the wake of success, change in policy, let alone in more foundational ideas and narratives, is highly unlikely.

The conventional wisdom is intuitive, and it would seem to be backed by the historical record. Notably, it appears to fit the Cold War consensus. Broad agreement on ideology and policy supposedly so took hold in the United States by late 1947 or 1948 that alternatives to militarized global containment could not get a hearing. Pre-eminent for two decades, the consensus was blamed for numerous errors and tragedies of US policy – from military brinkmanship to imprudent intervention, most notably in Vietnam, to alliance with rapacious autocrats and brutal rebels to an inflated defense budget. According to the standard history, it finally unraveled only amidst the trauma of the Vietnam War: Americans lost faith in the Cold War as its military floundered in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

The Terror narrative took a seemingly different course: it survived public frustration with the failures of Iraq. The usual theory supplies an explanation: those failures were not clear or great enough to shake the war's narrative foundation. However, this explanation does not specify a priori how substantial failure must be to drive change. Equally important, it presumes that events speak for themselves, that the fact, magnitude, and sources of failure are clear to all. Part II builds on Part I 's account of the rise of dominant narratives of national security to advance a provocative theory of when they endure and when they fall.

If any events have unambiguous meaning, without need for intervening narration, attacks on the homeland – notably, that on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and that on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001 – would seem to fit the bill. At the very least, these events should have imparted such unimpeded narrative authority to the president that it hardly mattered how he expressed himself. It is true that these attacks marked turning points, that they gave birth to dominant narratives of national security, and that the president was crucial to those narratives' rise to dominance. Those narratives limned the full dramatic pentad: they identified the issues at stake, the protagonists, the sources of aggression, the setting of conflict, and the conditions for peace. But neither Pearl Harbor nor 9/11 had to yield the particular pentad that it did. There was more than one conceivable narrative configuration that might have become dominant. Moreover, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's and George W. Bush's preferred narratives rose to the top depended not just on structural openings and institutional advantages, this chapter maintains, but on these authoritative speakers seizing the rhetorical opportunity and embracing the storytelling mode. Their rhetorical interventions shaped both the debates and the policy that followed.

Narrating the origins of German aggression

In Americans' collective memory, the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 was the key moment when Americans finally put “isolationism” and “divisionism” behind them. The attack resolved the narrative contest that had riven the nation in recent years. No one could any longer deny that the Axis threatened the survival of the United States and the American way of life. This was “the good war,” and Americans swiftly united, in accord over both policy and its underlying narrative foundation.

Yet, US officials did not see things that way at the time. They did not think the Japanese attack had brushed aside all significant opposition. They noted how rapidly public indifference had set in. They fretted that Americans were not prepared for the long, hard slog they expected. Most worrisome of all, Americans still lacked a well-defined narrative of national security.

In the winter of 2007, as Americans grew increasingly weary of a protracted and seemingly unwinnable war in Iraq, President George W. Bush bucked the political winds and, rather than bring the troops home, called for dispatching more forces, a “surge.” This would be a last-ditch effort to bring order to Iraq, which had known little peace since US forces had invaded the country and toppled Saddam Hussein's regime four years before. But, while the military struggled to dominate the battlefield in Iraq, Bush faced a rhetorical insurgency at home. This was not a surge, many Democrats warned, but a dangerous “escalation.” Failing to back the surge was tantamount to capitulating to “Jihadist Joe,” one Republican congressman memorably charged. Democratic opponents countered that resisting the surge was the surest way to save “GI Joe.” Where the administration saw controllable “sectarian strife,” many Democrats saw an unmanageable “civil war.” There was a lot at stake in these rhetorical battles. Both sides believed that, with their patience wearing thin, Americans wanted nothing to do with someone else's “civil war.” Sectarian or civil “strife,” though, seemed like a law-and-order problem, just the sort of thing that well-meaning outsiders could help to quash.

Such familiar rhetorical contests shape the course of politics, even in matters of national security. That is hardly news to politicians the world over, who spend untold sums on staff and consultants to help them craft their messages. It would not surprise generations of scholars across the humanities and social sciences who have labored to reveal language's inner workings and contradictions, its relationship to human cognition and experience, and its deep structures, and to catalog the techniques of rhetorical mastery. Yet, it would come as news to many scholars of politics, especially of foreign policy and international relations, who often dismiss “mere” rhetoric as posturing and as unworthy of analysis. This book sides with the politicians – not because the world of politics is a genteel debating society, whose participants politely puzzle over the central issues of the day, but because it is not. In politics, language is a crucial medium, means, locus, and object of contest. It neither competes with nor complements power politics: it is power politics. Through language, actors exercise influence over others' behavior. Through language, political subjects are produced and social relations defined.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was, by all accounts, a master orator. His Fireside Chats are cited as paradigmatic moments of presidential rhetorical leadership. Nearly half a century later, Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, known as the “Great Communicator” for his capacity to connect with and inspire mass audiences. If any presidents should have been able to impose their will on the nation's security narratives, they should have. Yet, Roosevelt could not shunt aside the non-interventionist alternative before Pearl Harbor, and Reagan could not persuade Americans of the danger that Nicaragua's governing Sandinistas posed to US national security, nor could he silence his, and the Nicaraguan rebels', critics. Rhetorical skill is not, on its own, enough to ensure narrative dominance – as these masters of the bully pulpit would attest.

Perhaps Roosevelt and Reagan failed because “going public” is simply not effective. That inference would be warranted if presidents' interventions did not sometimes profoundly shape the contours of US political debate – but they do. One might argue that presidents fall short when they are not skilled orators, when they are not deeply committed to the cause, and when they are reluctant to expend resources and to risk political capital – but the examples of Roosevelt and Reagan suggest otherwise. The theoretical framework of the preceding chapter offers four possible explanations. First, presidents can misread the narrative situation. They may wrongly believe that they are facing an unsettled period in which public demand for storytelling is high, and so they may traffic heavily in that rhetorical mode. In short, a mistaken opportunity. Second, presidents can err in thinking the political structure highly constrained, shy away from storytelling even when it might be well received, and opt for argument to legitimate their policies. In short, a missed opportunity. Third, presidents can remain silent and fail to seize the rhetorical initiative, allowing others to fill the narrative vacuum – another missed opportunity. Both missed and mistaken opportunities permit narrative alternatives to flourish and channel opposition to leaders' programs. Fourth, presidents can be dealt a bad rhetorical hand – the absence of opportunity. When public demand for storytelling is low, whether because the narrative situation is settled or because they are operating in the wake of foreign policy triumph, presidents can do little to rewrite the nation's security narrative.

Viewed through the prism of public narrative, the Cold War consensus takes on a surprising shape. A narrow shared narrative of national security regarding the Communist adversary and the interconnected nature of global politics rose to dominance in the first half of the 1950s, amidst a frustrating war in Korea. It fell apart in the early 1960s, even before the Johnson administration ramped up the US commitment to South Vietnam. A new consensus regarding the protagonists in global politics and their relationship failed to coalesce through the mid 1970s. However, a common elite narrative on America's role in the world emerged from the domestic turmoil unleashed by the Vietnam War. These were not the faithful and straightforward reflections of global realities, nor were they the usual expected responses to policy failure and success.

Rather, as this chapter shows in detail, they were the result of the narrative politics of the military and diplomatic battlefield, per the theoretical logic of Chapter 5. As expected, opposition hawks and doves alike responded to battlefield setbacks by reproducing the narrative in whose terms the war had been legitimated. Thus, during the Korean War, conservative hawks in the Republican opposition blamed the Truman administration not for wasting blood and treasure in a peripheral conflict, but for having left East Asia vulnerable to Communist predation through its inconsistent pursuit of containment – that is, for a policy that was not global enough. They thereby deprived a non-globalist alternative narrative of its leading voices and helped to consolidate the Cold War consensus. During the Vietnam War, “responsible” critics in both parties – all but the most extreme doves – did not take advantage of the faltering and increasingly unpopular intervention to break with the logic of the Cold War. Rather, they maintained that the war was not worth the candle or that it was a misapplication of containment. Both lines of argument re-inscribed the Cold War, rather than upend it. Meanwhile, hawks in the Republican Party did not seize upon the US military's setbacks in that faraway land to revive the nationalist narrative, but rather embraced their new role as standard-bearers of Cold War globalism and aggressive internationalism. In so doing, they joined liberals to beat back the “radical” challengers to American exceptionalism.