Description
The burgeoning study of narratives and war in International Relations has effectively highlighted how conflicts have been legitimated to domestic publics and the international community. Far less attention, however, has been devoted to the narratives of war termination (for notable exceptions, see Sanders and Tuck 2020; Walldorf 2022). Accordingly, this paper conducts a discourse analysis of the language used by policymakers and politicians in the United States to justify and contest the American withdrawals from the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars. These cases cover variations in presidential partisanship and different international security environments, highlighting important commonalities and differences in the language used by elites. In particular, the paper utilises the insights of ontological security studies to explore how these withdrawals relate to America’s identity as a ‘winner’ in war and world politics more generally (see Hall 2022). Especially given the widely agreed political costs of ‘losing’ wars across regime type, this study thus contributes to filling an important gap in International Relations scholarship concerning the politics of war termination.