Woolfson, Alexander F.
(2012)
The discourse of exceptionalism and U.S. grand strategy, 1946–2009.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
This thesis argues that American exceptionalism is a necessary, but insufficient,
way of reading U.S. foreign policy. Exceptionalism is employed by different
ideologists in different ways and in differing contexts. This thesis employs the
contextualist methodology of Quentin Skinner to challenge proleptic, static
understandings of American exceptionalism and, in doing so, uncovers American
grand strategy as a keenly contested ideological battleground. In each constituent
case study, the thesis identifies the ideological innovators of American strategic
policy and the key moments of ideological innovation, and examines why
ideological innovations became conventional, or not.
The analysis proceeds with an introduction to the composition of grand strategy,
continues with an examination of Quentin Skinner’s version of Cambridge School
contextual analysis, and then places Skinnerian contextualism within the broader
framework of International Relations theory. This analysis illustrates the
methodological advantage of Skinnerian contextualism, which allows the
reconstruction of the context in which past generations of ideological innovators
operated and conceived of the world and the place of the United States within it.
This specific type of analysis demonstrates ideological innovation in practice at
four pivotal moments in American foreign policy: first, the emergence of
containment as the cornerstone of the Truman Doctrine at the outset of the Cold
War; second, détente and the supposed injection of realism into American foreign
policy; third, President Clinton’s strategy of enlargement and the place of
American exceptionalism in the aftermath of the Cold War; and, fourth, the Bush
Doctrine and the interaction between American exceptionalism and
neoconservatism.
The thesis concludes by stressing the particularities of historical context, having
demonstrated that, although exceptionalism has rarely been the only causal
dynamic of American grand strategy, it has consistently provided the context with
which innovating ideologists have been required to engage in order to create their
own version of grand strategy.
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