Description
Utilizing securitization theory, this paper conceptualizes the invocation of ‘isolationism’ in US foreign policy discourse during the Vietnam War as a performative security discourse - a tangle of multiple interwoven processes and practices. These performative, often literally self-effacing, security practices reproduced, constituted, and historicized various aspects of US identity and foreign policy through the mechanism of threat construction.
During the Nixon administration, isolationism was presented as a threat. Using the language of securitization theory: isolationism was constructed as an existential threat to the existence of the US. That is, the administration securitized the issue via performative security speech acts.
At the onset of the Cold War, the ‘debts’ of US WWII sacrifice, often portrayed as ‘lessons’, were ‘honored’ with prescribed foreign policy approaches: international engagement, focused on supporting allies and confronting (communist) aggression. Beginning in 1969, the Nixon administration began recasting this approach as an ‘overextension’ that could cause the US to rapidly regress to existentially threatening isolationism. Not only did the usage of isolationism discourse increase during the Nixon administration, but was also directed at both Senators accepted as ‘internationalist’ and heretofore ‘traditional’ foreign policy approaches.
Drawing on Nietzsche (1998) and Derrida (1986), this paper theorizes that securitizations referencing ‘historical foundations’ – or sacrifices in honor of such foundations (such as isolationism discourse) - operate in a manner similar to Derrida’s ‘founding acts’. The performative security speech act both constructs itself and functions as its own constative, a priori context. This context draws on elements of existing identity and aspects of a foundational past (cf. Derrida, 1986; Honig, 1991; Der Derian, 1995; Nietzsche, 1998).
Through the process of constructing a threat, there is an opportunity to modify national concepts of identity, both in terms of what are appropriate foreign policy objectives, and what national past is presented as true – which in turn justifies these foreign policy approaches. The Nixon administration appeared to both acknowledge and supplement traditional post-war US identities through an amalgamation of foreign policy-making and isolationism security discourse. This was undertaken to incorporate into the national identity sacrifices (foreign and domestic) incurred because of Vietnam, all in aid of promoting Nixon’s foreign policy approach.
This paper seeks to explore the (re)production of identity through the processes of performative security discourses, in the context of foreign policy and security construction. Security speech acts designate the limits of a given order by constructing existential threats that both define what is under threat (i.e. the self) and what the given order is unable to deal with. This act, this rupture “implies a claim to enact new possibilities of right and wrong” (Huysmans, 2011: 374).
By theorizing the use of isolationist security discourse during the Nixon administration as indicative of such a rupture, this paper proposes to understand the performative power of security discourses to constitute identity, foreign policies, security, and the ‘international’ itself.
