What fear hath wrought : missile hysteria and the writing of "America"

Abstract

Scholars have linked the perpetuation of US militarism to ideological constructions of the Soviet Union as a dangerous "Other". These constructions partly stemmed from the ways in which various discourses-realist scholarship in international relations, strategic studies, nuclear stategy, geopolitics, Sovietology, communism, and so on-were structured. Using recent US national security discourse on missile defence, this study examines the relationship between US national and theatre missile defense policy and discursive constructions of "rogue states" and the "China threat" as potentially dangerous Others which ostensibly threaten the US. More fundamentally, this study argues that such constructions of danger in US security discourse are crucial precisely because they matter to the ways in which the very identity of "America" are known and understood.