Twin Pillars to the Axis of Evil: Presidential Security Metaphors and the Justification of American Intervention in the Persian Gulf, 1971-2001

Abstract

On January 16, 1968, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced that his country would withdraw its forces from the Persian Gulf by 1971. U.S. policymakers interpreted this decision through the lens of the Cold War. They feared that the Gulf—a region whose oil was vital to American defense strategy—was at risk of becoming a “vacuum” and falling under the sway of the Soviet Union. Over the next three decades the United States would steadily assert its dominance in the Persian Gulf, as American policy toward the region evolved in tandem with the language used by presidential administrations to conceptualize and address the challenges they saw in the area. This study examines the security metaphors (and the ideas and images they conveyed)employed by U.S. presidents to sell their national security vision for the Persian Gulf to the American people. Four presidential metaphors—Twin Pillars, Strategic Consensus, the New World Order, and Dual Containment—functioned to reconstitute norms of sovereignty and American responsibility for the Gulf. Drawing on the symbolism of the Cold War, these metaphors were used by presidential administrations to progressively articulate a U.S. right of intervention in the region to combat forces perceived to be hostile to U.S. interests. The power of these metaphors derives from the way their logics and symbolism built on each other, collectively constructing interpretive frameworks through which officials, commentators, and reporters made sense of the region and its importance to the United States. This project is divided into four case studies to examine each metaphor, focusing on the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. In each chapter, I outline the development of the metaphor within the administration, analyze the public invocations of the metaphor in presidential discourse, trace expressions of the metaphor and its symbolism in press coverage and foreign policy commentary, and consider criticisms directed at each metaphor. In sketching the constitutive trajectory of each metaphor, I show how the collective picture the presidential administrations painted of the Gulf as a vulnerable and vital region worked to encourage military intervention. These rhetorical developments linked the Cold War to the War on Terror, ultimately setting the stage for George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” campaign and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.