Description
This paper examines the discursive deployment of “friends” and “friendship” in public-facing US international relations media. Instead of analyzing interstate relations against pre-figured understandings of what friendship is (and is not), the paper examines how a vision of “friendship” emerges and changes over seventeen years, from the final months of the George W. Bush administration to the early months of Donald Trump’s second administration. This timeframe allows for an analysis of how international relations media use the notion of friendship to indicate shifts in US international policy priorities and alliances. The primary sources for this study consist of documents obtained from a non-partisan international policy think tank and keyword-searched for friends and friendship. The anthropological-analytic adopted here maintains that to understand what people mean by “friendship,” one needs to observe how people deploy it. A preliminary finding suggests that US international relations media increasingly conceive friendship as fragile, flawed, and instrumental. The conclusion discusses the findings in the context of changing US domestic discourses about who and what to trust.
