SHAPING “A WORLD BEYOND A WAR”: THE TECHNOLOGICAL IMAGINARY OF U.S. GEOPOLITICAL DISCOURSE, 1939 – 2016

Abstract

In this dissertation, I theorize the technological imaginary to account for how the rhetoric of U.S. presidents has bolstered U.S. supremacy, hegemony, authority, and anxiety. Such presidential rhetoric addresses the destructive forces of rival nations, the threat of nuclear weaponry, and the rise of global threat in World War II, the Cold War, and the U.S. War on Terror in the Middle East. The combination of expanding power and growing anxiety associated with wartime technological advances has created a level of palpable fear that has given presidents considerable authority and deference across these seventy-five years to make decisions on matters of U.S. foreign policy with worldwide implications. In Chapter 1, I argue that a significant aspect of the U.S. presidential depictions of technology during WWII was the call to increase military strength and defense spending to give the United States a decisive victory in both the European and Asian theaters. As I show, presidents constitute meanings of technology to justify U.S. interventionism, U.S. sovereignty, and U.S. national security expressed through three central topoi: protectionism, securitization, and morality. These three themes are foundational to my theorization of the technological imaginary. Protectionism is grounded in the presumption that nation-states and their leaders have a responsibility to protect their citizens. Securitization helps presidents justify their buildup of the most advanced weapons to protect the people and to deter the enemy from attacking. And presidents turn to U.S. morality—democracy, peace, freedom—to justify their use and authority over military arsenals. I then trace how the themes of protectionism, securitization, and morality circulate across the Cold War and the War on Terror to elaborate the technological imaginary. In Chapter 2, I focus on how U.S. Cold War presidents articulated a technological discourse that enabled the United States to protect the people and its allies as presidents navigated the treacherous international security environment, projected U.S. technological superiority, and advanced the United States as a moral superpower. As the USSR and the United States built a nuclear arsenal that achieved the level of assured mutual destruction, fears over the weapons designed to protect the people became the source of insecurity. The calls for nuclear buildup to defeat communism clashed with the fears over the weapons themselves, producing what I call a technological paradox. On one side of the paradox is technological essentialism that reinforces the need for the United States to strengthen its defense systems to protect the American people and its allies from enemy threats. On the other side of this paradox is a fear over the nuclear weapons designed to provide such protection. I conceive of this fear as technological nihilism undermining the securitization that such weapons were designed to achieve. Presidents who prioritized technological essentialism and technological nihilism all routinely turn to U.S. morality to justify their technological positioning. Some, such as Presidents Truman and Reagan, justify nuclear buildup in more realist terms to protect the peace and preserve American democracy from the evils of communism. Others justify nuclear treaties in more internationalist terms to reinforce American democratic commitments to diplomacy and to forestall the threat of war. This technological paradox is integral to my conceptualization of the technological imaginary. Chapter 3 examines the ways in which presidents during the War on Terror manage the technological paradox that integrates arguments of technological essentialism/realism and nihilism/internationalism. I also trace shifts in these arguments from past years as Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama assume the authority to determine which nation-states can develop nuclear weapons and those which cannot. While Bush reinforces a commitment to realist principles and technological essentialism, Obama’s rhetoric exhibits the qualities of a technological utopia in places, even as he also affirms the themes of technological essentialism and technological nihilism across his rhetoric. In the Afterword, I elaborate my theory of the technological imaginary and the role that presidents serve in fusing U.S. national identity with American hegemony through expressions of technology in their foreign policy rhetoric across the three central topoi. Technological essentialism, securitization, and realism have helped presidents and the United States achieve and sustain its technological supremacy, culminating in the U.S. role as imperial leaders of technological weaponry across the globe. Arguments of technological nihilism, morality, and internationalism have provided a counterbalance to such imperialism and mutual-assured destruction. Yet, presidential authority over technological production and determinism reinforces the undemocratic nature of the technological development and the role of economic supremacy in sustaining such power. Presidents assume control to define and use such weaponry and to allow or forbid other political actors from doing so. Presidential reifications of technological essentialism reify a natural order of U.S. technological advancement and supremacy, yet ideological commitments of technological nihilism pose the hope of destabilizing such contrivances.