Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T17:44:11.973Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

How Dominant Narratives Rise and Fall: Military Conflict, Politics, and the Cold War Consensus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2015

Ronald R. Krebs
Get access

Abstract

Contemporaries and historians often blame the errors and tragedies of US policy during the Cold War on a dominant narrative of national security: the “Cold War consensus.” Its usual periodization, according to which it came together in the late 1940s and persisted until the late 1960s when it unraveled amidst the trauma of the Vietnam War, fits well with a common theory of change in ideas and discourse. That theory expects stasis until a substantial unexpected failure (in this domain, military defeat) discredits dominant ideas and unsettles dominant coalitions. However, systematic data reveal the standard history of this important case to be wrong. Based on a large-scale content analysis of newspaper editorials on foreign affairs, this article shows that the Cold War narrative was narrower than conventional accounts suggest, that it did not coalesce until well into the 1950s, and that it began to erode even before the Vietnam War's Americanization in 1965. To make sense of this puzzle, I develop an alternative theory of the rise and fall of the narratives that underpin and structure debate over national security. Rooted in the dynamics of public narrative and the domestic politics of the battlefield, the theory argues that military failure impedes change in the narrative in whose terms government officials had legitimated the mission, whereas victory creates the opportunity for departures from the dominant narrative. Process-tracing reveals causal dynamics consistent with the theory: failure in the Korean War, which might have undermined Cold War globalism, instead facilitated the Cold War narrative's rise to dominance (or consensus); and the triumph of the Cuban Missile Crisis made possible that dominant narrative's breakdown before the upheaval of Vietnam. This hard and important case suggests the need to rethink the relationship between success, failure, and change in dominant narratives of national security—and perhaps in other policy domains as well.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Organization , Volume 69 , Issue 4 , Fall 2015 , pp. 809 - 845
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Acheson, Dean. 1969. Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Allison, Graham T. 1970–1971. Cool It: The Foreign Policy of Young America. Foreign Policy (1):144–60.Google Scholar
Ansolabehere, Stephen, Lessem, Rebecca, and Snyder, James M. Jr. 2006. The Orientation of Newspaper Endorsements in US Elections, 1940–2002. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 1 (4):393–404.Google Scholar
Bacevich, Andrew J. 2007. Introduction. In The Long War: A New History of US National Security Policy Since World War II, edited by Bacevich, Andrew J., vii–xiv. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Barnett, Michael N. 1998. Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Berger, Thomas U. 1998. Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernstein, Barton J. 1971. Election of 1952. In History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, Vol. 4, edited by Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., 385–436. New York: Chelsea House.Google Scholar
Beschloss, Michael R. 1991. The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963. New York: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Bially Mattern, Janice. 2005. Ordering International Politics: Identity, Crisis, and Representational Force. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruner, Jerome S. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Buzan, Barry, Wæver, Ole, and de Wilde, Jaap. 1998. Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.Google Scholar
Capoccia, Giovanni, and Kelemen, R. Daniel. 2007. The Study of Critical Junctures: Theory, Narrative, and Counterfactuals in Historical Institutionalism. World Politics 59 (3):341–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caridi, Ronald J. 1968. The Korean War and American Politics: The Republican Party as a Case Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Casey, Steven. 2008. Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion in the United States, 1950–1953. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chambers II, John Whiteclay, ed. 1999. The Oxford Companion to American Military History. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Craig, Campbell, and Logevall, Fredrik. 2009. America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Critchlow, Donald T. 2007. The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Diamond, Edwin. 1993. Behind the Times: Inside the New New York Times. New York: Villard Books.Google Scholar
Divine, Robert A. 1974. Foreign Policy and US Presidential Elections: 1952–1960. New York: New Viewpoints.Google Scholar
Dobbin, Frank. 1994. Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dobbs, Michael. 2008. One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Donovan, Robert J. 1982. Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1949–1953. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Editor and Publisher International Year Book. 1980–1989. New York: Editor and Publisher.Google Scholar
Ferrell, Robert H., ed. 1981. The Eisenhower Diaries. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Fordham, Benjamin O. 1998. Building the Cold War Consensus: The Political Economy of US National Security, 1949–51. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Fordham, Benjamin O. 2002. Domestic Politics, International Pressure, and the Allocation of American Cold War Military Spending. Journal of Politics 64 (1):63–88.Google Scholar
Fordham, Benjamin O. 2008. Economic Interests and Congressional Voting on Security Issues. Journal of Conflict Resolution 52 (5):623–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaddis, John Lewis. 1982. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gaddis, John Lewis. 1987. The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Garthoff, Raymond L. 1989. Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.Google Scholar
Gelb, Leslie H. 1976. Dissenting on Consensus. In The Vietnam Legacy: The War, American Society, and the Future of American Foreign Policy, edited by Lake, Anthony, 102–19. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Gelb, Leslie H., and Betts, Richard K.. 1979. The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.Google Scholar
George, Alice L. 2003. Awaiting Armageddon: How Americans Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Giglio, James N. 1991. The Presidency of John F. Kennedy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.Google Scholar
Goble, Hannah, and Holm, Peter M.. 2009. Breaking Bonds? The Iraq War and the Loss of Republican Dominance in National Security. Political Research Quarterly 62 (2):215–29.Google Scholar
Goddard, Stacie E. 2009. Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and Northern Ireland. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Griffith, Robert. 1979. Old Progressives and the Cold War. Journal of American History 66 (2):334–47.Google Scholar
Habel, Philip D. 2012. Following the Opinion Leaders? The Dynamics of Influence Among Media Opinion, the Public, and Politicians. Political Communication 29 (3):257–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halberstam, David. 1969. The Best and the Brightest. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Hall, Peter A. 1993. Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State: The Case of Economic Policymaking in Britain. Comparative Politics 25 (3):275–96.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Halperin, Morton H., and Clapp, Priscilla A., with Kanter, Arnold. 1974. Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.Google Scholar
Hammack, Phillip L., and Pilecki, Andrew. 2012. Narrative as a Root Metaphor for Political Psychology. Political Psychology 33 (1):75–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hay, Colin. 1996. Narrating Crisis: The Discursive Construction of the “Winter of Discontent.” Sociology 30 (2):253–77.Google Scholar
Hermann, Charles F. 1990. Changing Course: When Governments Choose to Redirect Foreign Policy. International Studies Quarterly 34 (1):3–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoffmann, Stanley. 1978. Primacy or World Order: American Foreign Policy Since the Cold War. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Hogan, Michael J. 1998. A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Holsti, Ole R., and Rosenau, James N.. 1984. American Leadership in World Affairs: Vietnam and the Breakdown of Consensus. Boston: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Holsti, Ole R., and Rosenau, James N.. 1986. Consensus Lost. Consensus Regained? Foreign Policy Beliefs of American Leaders, 1976–1980. International Studies Quarterly 30 (4):375–409.Google Scholar
Hoover, Herbert. 1955. Addresses Upon the American Road, 1950–1955. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Hughes, Thomas L. 1980. The Crack-Up: The Price of Collective Irresponsibility. Foreign Policy (40):33–60.Google Scholar
Hulsey, Byron C. 2000. Everett Dirksen and His Presidents: How a Senate Giant Shaped American Politics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.Google Scholar
Information Please Almanac, Atlas, and Yearbook. 1973–74, 1976. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus. 2006. Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Dominic D.P., and Tierney, Dominic. 2006. Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kaufman, Burton Ira. 1986. The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Command. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Kegley, Charles W. Jr. 1986. Assumptions and Dilemmas in the Study of Americans’ Foreign Policy Beliefs: A Caveat. International Studies Quarterly 30 (4):447–71.Google Scholar
Kennedy, John F. 1962. Television and Radio Interview: “After Two Years—A Conversation with the President” (17 December). Available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9060&st=&st1=#ixzz1l2qICRuR>. Accessed 9 June 2014..+Accessed+9+June+2014.>Google Scholar
Kennedy, John F. 1963. Commencement Address at American University, Washington, DC (10 June). Available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9266&st=&st1=#ixzz1l2tVoncx>. Accessed 9 June 2014..+Accessed+9+June+2014.>Google Scholar
Kepley, David R. 1988. The Collapse of the Middle Way: Senate Republicans and the Bipartisan Foreign Policy, 1948–1952. New York: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Krebs, Ronald R. 2013. The Rise, Persistence, and Fall of the War on Terror. In How 9/11 Changed Our Ways of War, edited by Burk, James, 56–85. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Krebs, Ronald R. 2015. Narrative and the Making of US National Security. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Krippendorff, Klaus. 2004. Reliability in Content Analysis: Some Common Misconceptions and Recommendations. Human Communication Research 30 (3):411–33.Google Scholar
Kruglanski, Arie W. 2004. The Psychology of Closed Mindedness. New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Laqueur, Walter, and Labedz, Leopold, eds. 1962. Polycentrism: The New Factor in International Communism. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Legro, Jeffrey W. 2005. Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Lustick, Ian S. 1993. Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Mahoney, James, and Thelen, Kathleen, eds. 2010. Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Matusow, Allen J. 1984. The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
May, Ernest R. 1962. The Nature of Foreign Policy: The Calculated versus the Axiomatic. Daedalus 91 (4):653–67.Google Scholar
McGee, Michael Calvin, and Nelson, John S.. 1985. Narrative Reason in Public Argument. Journal of Communication 35 (4):139–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meyers, David Allan. 2007. Dissenting Voices in America's Rise to Power. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mueller, John E. 1971. Trends in Popular Support for the Wars in Korea and Vietnam. American Political Science Review 65 (2):358–75.Google Scholar
Nash, Philip. 1997. The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957–1963. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Oakes, John B., Oral History. Columbia University Libraries. Available at <http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/nny/oakesjb/>, accessed 30 September 2014.,+accessed+30+September+2014.>Google Scholar
Page, Benjamin I., and Shapiro, Robert Y.. 1992. The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Paterson, Thomas G., ed. 1971. Cold War Critics: Alternatives to American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.Google Scholar
Patterson, James T. 1972. Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Perelman, Chaïm, and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie. 1969 [1958]. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Translated by Wilkinson, John and Weaver, Purcell. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Perrow, Charles. 1984. Normal Accidents. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Pierson, Paul. 2004. Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Radosh, Ronald. 1975. Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Riker, William H. 1986. The Art of Political Manipulation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Riker, William H. 1996. The Strategy of Rhetoric: Campaigning for the American Constitution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Ringmar, Erik. 1996. Identity, Interest and Action: A Cultural Explanation of Sweden's Intervention in the Thirty Years War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenau, James N. 1963. National Leadership and Foreign Policy: A Case Study in the Mobilization of Public Support. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Rothbard, Murray N. 2007. The Betrayal of the American Right. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute.Google Scholar
Russett, Bruce M., and Hanson, Elizabeth C.. 1975. Interest and Ideology: The Foreign Policy Beliefs of American Businessmen. San Francisco: Freeman.Google Scholar
Selverstone, Marc J. 2009. Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945–1950. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Sherry, Michael S. 1997. In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Skocpol, Theda, Munson, Ziad, Karch, Andrew, and Camp, Bayliss. 2002. Patriotic Partnerships: Why Great Wars Nourished American Civic Voluntarism. In Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, edited by Katznelson, Ira and Shefter, Martin, 134–80. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Snyder, Jack L. 1991. Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Spiegel, Steven L. 1985. The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America's Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Steel, Ronald. 1980. Walter Lippmann and the American Century. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Stemler, Steven E., and Tsai, Jessica. 2008. Best Practices in Interrater Reliability: Three Common Approaches. In Best Practices in Quantitative Methods, edited by Osborne, Jason, 29–49. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Suri, Jeremi. 2003. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Swidler, Ann. 1986. Culture in Action. American Sociological Review 51 (2):273–86.Google Scholar
Talese, Gay. 1970. The Kingdom and the Power. New York: Bantam Books.Google Scholar
Tifft, Susan E., and Jones, Alex S.. 1999. The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Uebersax, John. 2013. Statistical Methods for Rater and Diagnostic Agreement. Available at <http://www.john-uebersax.com/stat/agree.htm>. Accessed 22 May 2013..+Accessed+22+May+2013.>Google Scholar
Weisbrot, Robert. 2001. Maximum Danger: Kennedy, the Missiles, and the Crisis of American Confidence. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.Google Scholar
Weisiger, Alex. 2013. Logics of War: Explanations for Limited and Unlimited Conflicts. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Welch, David A. 2005. Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Wendt, Lloyd. 1979. Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American Newspaper. Chicago: Rand McNally.Google Scholar
Widmaier, Wesley W. 2007. Constructing Foreign Policy Crises: Interpretive Leadership in the Cold War and War on Terrorism. International Studies Quarterly 51 (4):779–94.Google Scholar
Widmaier, Wesley W., Blyth, Mark, and Seabrooke, Leonard. 2007. Exogenous Shocks or Endogenous Constructions? The Meanings of Wars and Crises. International Studies Quarterly 51 (4):747–59.Google Scholar
Wildavsky, Aaron. 1966. The Two Presidencies. Society 35 (2):23–31.Google Scholar
Wittkopf, Eugene R. 1990. Faces of Internationalism: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
The World Almanac and Book of Facts. 1946–1972, 1975, 1977–1979. New York: Press Pub. Co.Google Scholar
Wunderlin, Clarence E. 2006. The Papers of Robert A. Taft. Vol. 4 (1949–1953). Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.Google Scholar
Zaller, John. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Zelizer, Julian E. 2010. Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security from World War II to the War on Terrorism. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Krebs supplementary material

Krebs supplementary material 1

Download Krebs supplementary material(File)
File 444 KB
Supplementary material: PDF

Krebs supplementary material

Krebs supplementary material 2

Download Krebs supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 1.4 MB