American Strategic Narrative - A Success Story or an Archetypal Rhetoric

Abstract

Great powers rationalize their position and actions to their people, allies, and opponents. Empirical observations avow the existence of a grand narrative as a fundamental feature in the struggle for supremacy and justification to seize the top position by a great power. The American case is unique; desirous of holding persistent world leadership, it has to constantly adjust its narrative which resonates with the change in time and age shifts. This paper attempts to assess the role of strategic narrative in shaping the US envisaged world order while critically analyzing whether the American strategic narratives have been a success story or just another archetypal rhetoric. While giving an overview of the American narrative from the Monroe Doctrine to the present time, the paper argues that perhaps the American policymakers sometimes overlooked the policy-narrative linkage. Arguably, the American narrative lacked consistency and coherence as it contradicted with actual American foreign policies and created an observable policy-narrative gap. The US's narrative building was characterized by the 'need of time' and it kept mutating from the Cold War to the global war on terror, sometimes entirely contradictory to previously held stances. This paper further highlights that the narratives that the United States adopted during different timeframes were meant to enable the execution of its policy objectives that were set for its path toward world leadership while ensuring that the narratives can gain acceptability as per normative standards and possess enough attraction to be transmitted through various media without catching agonizing criticism.