The Dual Containment metaphor: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and linking the Cold War to the War on Terror

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the Dual Containment metaphor of the Clinton administration, which reconciled President Clinton’s internationalist post-Cold War rhetoric with aggressive treatment of Iraq and Iran. I argue that the Clinton administration deployed the Dual Containment metaphor to redefine these two Persian Gulf states in line with Cold War topoi of enemyship and threat, symbolically and militarily confining them so that they could not endanger the project of democratic enlargement after the fall of the Soviet Union. While the Dual Containment label eventually fell out of circulation, its core elements saturated Clinton’s presidential rhetoric throughout his time in the White House and laid the rhetorical groundwork for George W. Bush’s foreign policy, culminating with his freedom agenda and military misadventures in the Gulf. In making this case, this essay shows how metaphors offer a useful device through which to assess the constitutive force of presidential rhetoric across diachronic, institutional, and articulatory contexts.