Grand strategy, grand rhetoric: The forgotten covenant of campaign 1992

This article conceptualises the production of foreign policy bullshit in electoral contexts as a result of contending incentives towards ambiguity and specificity. Candidates must speak to widely divergent, even contradictory, policy ideas to maximise voter share in primaries and elections. At the same time, overly broad rhetoric or evasion risks signalling incompetence and unsuitability for office. Candidates are thus incentivized to hide the compromise character of their suggestions behind hyper-specific rhetoric. Following literature from philosophy and linguistics, this is a form of deception best captured by ‘bullshit’, that is, when the candidate simply does not care too much whether what they are saying matches with objective reality but does care that this inattention to truth is not known to the audience. This dynamic is illustrated in a case study on the 2015/2016 elections. Specifically, bipartisan support for a US-enforced no-fly zone in Syria cannot be explained by the tool’s likely utility and effectiveness. Instead, the tool’s value for many candidates lay in its effective communication of contradictory policy ideas. The tool allowed presidential hopefuls to appear resolute yet responsible, purposive yet pragmatic, idealist, and realist, while also signalling specificity and thus foreign policy expertise.

Section: Foreign Policy Bullshit Between Ambiguity and Specificitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This articles thus explores the interlinkage between electoral politics, rhetoric, and foreign policy. Like other articles in this special issue, it illuminates the incentives and constraints presidential candidates grapple with when speaking about foreign policy (Boys, 2021; Lacatus and Meibauer, 2021; Payne, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Ambiguous specificity: The production of foreign policy bullshit in electoral contexts

Meibauer

2020

“…These criticisms are normally coupled with proposed alternative foreign policies which would resolve the failures of the previous administration (Armacost, 2015: 119). In this way, candidates can use their foreign policy rhetoric to establish their credibility as a future commander-in-chief (Boys, 2021), highlight particular issues that they care about, or contrast themselves to other candidates (Johnstone and Priest, 2017: 4).…”

Section: Foreign Policy Rhetoric On the Campaign Trail And In Governmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

In search of enemies: Donald Trump’s populist foreign policy rhetoric

Hall

2020

This article asks how Donald Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric during his presidential campaign and presidency has affected US foreign policy in the area of overseas counterterrorism campaigns. Looking at two case studies – the May 2017 Arab Islamic American Summit and the US role in the counter Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) campaign, it is argued that Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric has failed to accurately describe or legitimate his administration’s counterterrorism strategy, as per the conventional wisdom. Instead, Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric has largely been aimed at creating a sense of crisis (as populism requires) to mobilise his domestic base. In making this argument about the purpose of Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric, not only does the article contribute a new perspective to the extant literature on elections, rhetoric, and US foreign policy, but also to the burgeoning scholarship on governing populists and their foreign policies. Although these findings could be unique to Trump, the article’s novel framework – combining International Relations and populism scholarship to elaborate on how the foreign arena can be used to generate a state of perpetual crisis – can hopefully be applied in other contexts.

“…In addition, foreign policy issues rarely, if ever, dominate elections in the United States, and the electorate consistently prioritises domestic matters (Johnstone and Priest, 2017: 7). As Boys (2021) suggests in this special issue, this presents presidential hopeful with strategic challenges, especially when seeking to advance a foreign policy agenda. How do candidates talk about foreign policy issues if they run on a predominantly domestic platform?…”

Section: Foreign Policy Rhetoric and Electoral Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to the special issue: Elections, rhetoric and American foreign policy in the age of Donald Trump

Lacatus

Meibauer

2020

This introduction presents the special issue’s conceptual and empirical starting points and situates the special issue’s intended contributions. It does so by reviewing extant scholarship on electoral rhetoric and foreign policy and by teasing out several possible linkages between elections, rhetoric and foreign policy. It also discusses how each contribution to the special issue seeks to illuminate causal mechanisms at work in these linkages. Finally, it posits that these linkages are crucial to examining the changes brought about by Trump’s election and his foreign policy rhetoric.