Rhetorical Alchemy: American Exceptionalism and the War on Terror*

Abstract

The Bush administration's neoconservative foreign policy for the war on terror competes with two better known models of foreign policy. Detailed in the National Security Strategy of the United States, the policy draws on an eclectic amalgam of realist and liberal international relations theory to justify U.S. primacy at a time when majority mass public opinion favors international cooperation. To build public support for unilateral foreign policy, the administration used a number of appeals that projected an image of the United States as endowed with unique institutional and moral qualities that set it apart from the rest of the world. American exceptionalism proved to be a resonant moral catalyst for elite media support of unilateral U.S. military action. This article analyzes commentary and editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post prior to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to isolate the mechanism underlying the success of the administration's appeals and the implications of that success for media elites' support of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy.