A Strategic Narrative Construction of the Trump Administration on Iran’s Nuclear Program

Abstract

This study mainly aims to explore the strategic narrative that the Trump administration constructed about Iran’s nuclear program. The study tries to identify what kind of strategic narratives the Trump administration constructed during the period of the US withdrawal from the nuclear deal and its re-imposition of sanctions against Iran. For this purpose, the study was conducted by analyzing the official statements, remarks and speeches of U.S. foreign policy-makers, which make up the primary data source of the study. The qualitative method was adopted for data survey and collection, and the analysis of the obtained data was analyzed through the technique of qualitative content analysis. By using the qualitative method, the paper seeks to ascertain meaning construction in the discourse of foreign policy-makers. During the research process, it was observed that the Trump administration utilized strategic narratives on three different levels: issue narratives, identity narratives, and system narratives. The research concludes that the Trump administration employed the strategic narrative as a tool to legitimize its foreign policy decisions derived by the “maximum pressure” strategy that aimed to restrict Iran’s increasing power capacity and to reduce its regional influence in the Middle East.