National Missile Defence and the politics of US identity: A poststructural critique

By Natalie Bormann

Why adopt a poststructural lens for the reading of the military strategy of national missile defence (NMD)? No doubt, when contemplating an attack on US territory by intercontinental ballistic missiles, consulting Michel Foucault and critical international relations theory scholars may not seem the obvious route to take.
The answer to this lies in another question: why has there been so much interest and continuous investment in NMD deployment when there is such ambiguity surrounding the status of threat to which it responds, controversy over its technological feasibility and concern about its cost? Posed in this manner, the question cannot be answered on its own terms – the terms given in official accounts of NMD that justify the system’s significance on the basis of strategic feasibility studies and conventional threat predictions guided by worst-case scenarios. Instead, this book argues that the preferences leading to NMD deployment must be understood as satisfying requirements beyond strategic approaches and issues. In turning towards the interpretative modes of inquiry provided by critical social theory and poststructuralism, this book contests the conventional wisdom about NMD and suggests reading the strategy in terms of US identity.
Presented as an analysis of discourses on threats to national security, around which the need for NMD deployment is predominantly framed, this book is an effort to let the two fields of critical international relations theory and US foreign policy speak directly to each other. It seeks to do so by showing how the concept of identity can be harnessed to an analysis of a contemporary military-strategic practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847796707

Natalie Bormann

Natalie Bormann currently teaches in the Department of Politics, Northeastern University, Boston. Prior to this she was Visiting Assistant Professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University

Book preview

National missile defence and the

politics of US identity

National missile defence and the politics of US identity

A poststructural critique

NATALIE BORMANN

Copyright © Natalie Bormann 2008

The right of Natalie Bormann to be identified as the author of this

work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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First published 2008

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Contents

Preface

Introduction: national missile defence (NMD) and IR

1 Michel Foucault and NMD

2 Revisiting missile defence

3 NMD: issues and debates

4 NMD and foreign policy discourse

5 NMD and ‘regimes of truth’

6 NMD and the ‘everyday’

7 Reflections on NMD and identity

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Why adopt a poststructural lens for the reading of the military strategy of national missile defence (NMD)? No doubt, when contemplating an attack on US territory by intercontinental ballistic missiles, consulting Michel Foucault – and critical international relations theory scholars who draw on Foucault – may not seem the obvious route to take. The answer to this lies in another question: Why choose to deploy an enormously costly, technologically unfeasible (to date), and politically controversial defence project in response to a, much questioned, missile threat? The latest, 2006, Quadrennial Defense Review (a strategic planning pamphlet by the Department of Defense) calls for a 20 per cent increase in funding for the current NMD plan – to 10.4 billion dollars in 2007 – despite the lack of any discernible progress in developing a viable system. Most of us would agree that this does appear equally ambiguous. The conventional arguments for NMD, as will be illustrated in the following chapters, do not ‘add up’. Therefore, the path to understanding the workings behind, and of, missile defence must necessarily take us to unexpected places and beyond conventional inquiry, and this requires unconventional tools for analysis.

However, this book is not about theory (neither is it exclusively about Foucault). But it is about positing the validity of an alternative interpretation of the current missile defence project. This book is also not a reformist work as such, insofar as it is neither interested in proposing a more workable or ‘better’ explanation of missile defence, nor in pondering the merits of the defence project per se. But this book is concerned with the terms by which the weapons system circulates in our imagination of security, and in the representations and discourses that dominate the foreign and security debate. It begins with, and indeed is grounded in, the desire to understand a conundrum: why has there been so much interest and continuous investment in NMD deployment when, as will be shown, there is such ambiguity surrounding the status of threat it responds to, controversy over its technological feasibility and concern about its cost? Posed in this manner, the question cannot be answered on its own terms – the terms given in most official accounts of NMD that justify the system’s significance on the basis of strategic feasibility studies and conventional threat predictions guided by worst-case scenarios. Instead, in this book I argue that the preferences leading to NMD deployment must be understood as satisfying requirements beyond strategic approaches and issues. Crudely put, the significance of NMD lies elsewhere. In turning towards the interpretative modes of inquiry provided to us by critical social theory and poststructuralism, this book contests the conventional wisdom of, and about, NMD and suggests reading the strategy in terms of US identity. The impetus for doing so derives from the following insight: the articulation of foreign policy threats to national security is a practice that functions to enable and make possible a range of specific identities. It must be clear that no interpretation and representation of an outside threat exists independently of those to whom, on the inside, something/someone becomes threatening. In this view, the strategy of missile defence, I argue, is constitutive of a mechanism, a ritual, by which knowledge about a ‘threatening other’ is disciplined and affixed.

Presented as an analysis of discourses on threats to national security, around which the need for NMD deployment is predominantly framed, this book is an effort to let the two fields of critical international relations theory and US foreign policy address each other directly. It seeks to do so by showing how the concept of identity can be harnessed to an analysis of a contemporary military-strategic practice. This book thus re-works the dominant viewpoints that surround NMD and breaks with the prevailing assumptions of, and taken-for-granted motivations behind, US foreign and security policy: Instead of accepting or denying the validity of a missile threat, the writings here want to trace how the particular articulation of a threatening other with particular ‘foreign’ qualities, as exemplified by the notion of ‘rogue missile states’, has informed and sustained notions of a missile threat to the US. And in place of the more usual deliberations on the system’s technical feasibility and costs, this book seeks to trace the practices and inscriptions that give possibility to NMD’s claims of an ‘appropriate’ and legitimate response to the anticipated threat while excluding other, equally possible, responses. The politics of identity, I argue, is central to a re-reading of NMD as a particular US foreign policy preference.

The premise of this book is therefore twofold: first, to uncover the dominant narratives of NMD – the stories told about missiles and those who are said to deploy them – that have traditionally been presented to us as seamless and common-sensical in strategic terms; second, to provide an alternative, and arguably more inclusive, mode of interpretation of a strategy that is deeply embedded in social constructions and performances of identity.

Taking these points together, what this book therefore offers is an attempt to articulate an understanding of that which makes these policies of NMD possible to begin with. Central to this is the argument that any inquiry into the strategy of missile defence must necessarily begin with the question of its condition of possibility. Such an understanding will, in turn, contribute to our insights into the assumptions and constitutive effects of the terms of US security overall: The complexities of identity politics in the forging of the current defence strategy certainly translate, and are emblematic of, dominant strategic preferences. In other words, the ways in which missile defence becomes a possible strategic preference, while it forecloses others, resonates a practice that pervades contemporary US foreign and security policy overall.

Some acknowledgements are in order. Since this book is a revised PhD thesis, I am indebted to my former supervisor David Campbell whose intellectual influence was essential in the direction I have taken in the writings here and elsewhere. This book most definitely bears witness to a one-year visiting appointment at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, US, and I would like to thank especially James Der Derian, alongside with former Director Thomas Biersteker and other ‘Watsonites’, for supporting my stay and thereby aiding the development of this book. I owe a number of key refinements and arguments to an anonymous reviewer, who has been identified as Marc Lacy. Finally, thanks to numerous friends and colleagues for reading the entire manuscript (in most cases not voluntarily), engaging in ongoing conversations and helping in sharpening my thinking.

Introduction: national missile defence (NMD) and IR

In October 2004, the US began deploying first units of a national missile defence system – the single most expensive US weapons program, designed to protect US territory against attack by intercontinental ballistic missiles.¹ While the self-imposed deadline for fielding the completed system has come and gone over the last few years, the Department of Defense, under the auspices of the current administration of President George W. Bush, left no doubt as to its commitment to implementing the defence strategy. During the 2000 Presidential election, George W. Bush signalled, ‘America must build effective missile defences, based on the best available options, at the earliest possible date’ (Bush quoted in Kettle 2000). The yearly spending on missile defence is but one indicator that the defence project has become one of the central features of the current US security outlook. This being so, spending has amounted to about $9 billion per year, with the prospect of doubling this amount to about $19 billion per year by 2013.²

In spite of this evident commitment, some of us might still question the ‘urgency’ of making missile defence the topic of yet another book. After all, the idea of devising such a defence system is by far not new. In fact, efforts to do so have come and gone as a strategic imperative many times since World War Two, the most prominent example being former President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ initiative (more in Chapter 2). However, with the end of the Cold War the missile defence idea has – and some say curiously so – gained momentum: A series of milestones have been firmly laid towards deployment, the most significant of which was the National Missile Defense (NMD) Act of 1999. Introduced by the Clinton Administration at the time, the act uniquely established in law the policies of deploying a missile defence system for the United States and ‘as soon as technologically feasible’ (NMD Act 1999). This was followed by a robust timeline for implementing parts of the defence system, commissioned under Clinton’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, and as we could witness in the placement of interceptor missiles in Alaska (and California). And most controversially, we saw the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, which finally paved the way for unrestricted testing and deployment on the missile defence front. Besides pointing to the evidence towards implementation, the call for debating missile defence also alludes to another, often blithely made, point: Augmenting the military capacities already available to the US with NMD has led to a defence budget that is already high by historical standards.³ In addition to the costs, the system’s structure has been compared in its level of sophistication to the Manhattan project and in its technological challenge to the efforts of placing a man on the moon. All in all, perhaps no other military system since the last half of the twentieth century has been more contentious in provoking argument over its feasibility, costs and global repercussions (as will be discussed in Chapter 3).

To be sure, when confronted with the question ‘why missile defence?’ one could draw on many reasons and explanations (and I will speak to these in more detail in the upcoming chapters). Most certainly there would be mention of a gigantic military and industrial complex, its influence and historically notorious role in shaping US foreign policy.⁴ In the same breath, one would probably mention the political landscapes and bureaucratic proclivities of our – past and present – times (e.g., a Republican White House), the role of ideology in the shaping of security strategies (e.g., military supremacy), the influence of personalities (e.g., George W. Bush and the primacy of a ‘war president’), and certainly the overall marshalling of military instalments following September 11, 2001, from which the support for NMD could be easily deduced. The validity of these explanations is by now means disputed here; in fact, the aim is not to replace any of them or ‘explain them away’ as a mere discursive imagination. Of course, these traditional reasons may have an impact on certain security practices like missile defence (as much as they may provide some insight to these practices). However, and my intention is to show this, these representations of a certain kind of security milieu must not be assumed to be identical with these practices (or, to reflect ‘reality’).⁵ For example, and in a nutshell, for the most part the need for this post-Cold War military build-up is justified on the grounds of uncontrollable missile proliferation in the hands of so-called ‘rogue-states’ – or, as recently referred to as an ‘axis of evil’ – comprising in particular Iraq, Iran and North Korea as potentially hostile states to the US. Yet, none of these states currently possess the ability to reach the US with a ballistic missile from their own territory, nor have they expressed the willingness to do so.⁶ When one considers the possibility of diplomatic efforts, which have in the past successfully halted any further missile proliferation at the testing and development stage (albeit, admittedly, one can speak of a ‘rocky’ road to diplomacy), then one thing becomes clear: Neither the claimed threat to the US nor the superiority of a militarised security strategy over a diplomatic one is beyond question. Notwithstanding these challenges, most contributions have pushed the above concerns to the margins and have instead framed the debate predominantly through the technological aspects of a military strategy designed to protect US national security. Overall, the debate has been limited to arguments pertaining to the need for a missile defence system, or lack thereof, and dominated by a delineation of the system’s feasibility and costs, whilst addressing the question of international ramifications for global missile proliferation only speculatively. The question ‘are ballistic missile defences feasible?’ summarises one of the central concerns with respect to judging the project’s legitimacy and purpose amongst policy makers and scholars alike (Miller and Van Evera 1986). At their most challenging, discussions touch on the issue of counter-, or non-proliferation, arms control and global stability. At their most basic and common, however, debates focus on budgets, feasibility studies, weapon technologies and international repercussions at the interstate level. All in all, these terms of debate do not alone sufficiently explain the recent push for NMD, nor do they determine how NMD has been prioritised over possible alternative strategies.

The question then remains how we ought to make sense of NMD. I argue that, whilst much has been said about the empirical vindication of its technical and strategic aspects, very little attention has been paid to the underlying assumptions, performances, and constitutive effects that make possible the articulation of NMD as a meaningful strategy to begin with. I want to address this shortcoming by postulating a specific kind of intervention: One that uncovers the ‘identity effects’ of NMD.⁷ This is not an exercise of simply exchanging the existing scientific explanations for socio-political ones. Instead analysing NMD in terms of identity is a means of showing that the defence strategy, though understood as scientific and military in nature, is also profoundly enmeshed in social constructions and identity performances. Central to this is the claim that security is an integral part of articulations of identity, whereby security is taken to mean that the borders, which it constitutes, are also the point from which identity is constituted. In other words, identity does not exist a priori to the boundaries that need to be secured but is a consequence of this constitution (or securing) as much as it makes possible the notion of ‘what and against whom’ to secure.⁸

Taking identity seriously

It appears that questions of identity⁹ are becoming increasingly central to the overall study of international relations (IR).¹⁰ However, this is not necessarily true for all currents of the discipline; most orthodox theories (by which I mean essentially realism, liberalism and their ‘neo’ variants) tend to pay little attention to the questions surrounding identity and take identity as pre-given and fixed. Viewed from this perspective, identity is seen as ‘unproblematic’ and is relegated to the back seat regarding its analytical value for the foreign policy and security realm. This is so precisely because identity (and here I mean national identity in particular) is, more often than not, seen as already constituted and well bounded – in the form of the state. Most conventional literature on the state presupposes that the collective identity of its people (hence, the nation) is given by sanctity of ‘being-in the state’ and is deduced from assumptions of a shared bounded space. Put in those orthodox terms, identity as a concept is merely a fixed determinant on which state interests rest and from which its actions can be legitimately construed.¹¹

The tendency to downplay the significance of identity along these lines, in short, has deep roots: The realist tradition assumes that all units in global politics have only one meaningful identity – that of self-interested states. Examples include John Herz (1951) who codified the notion of (a state’s) identity as exogenous, mostly conveyed as an externally-produced interest, and determined deductively from the assumption of the anarchic, self-helped system within which states interact. Given the underlying assumption of anarchy and coupled with the believe that states strive at least for survival and at most for dominance, Kenneth Waltz’s (1979) Theory of International Politics describes a structural relationship among states, whereby a state’s interest is primarily driven and regulated by the distribution of material capabilities among states. It is these systemic capabilities (economic, military and political power) that determine if states will survive and if they can compete and dominate in a system of potential and actual threats to the inside order of the state. Subsequently, identity is equated to a fixed national interest that defines the security and survival of a state. Whilst these traditional authors (Waltz et al.) have refined their arguments over time to take account of multiple factors shaping interests, such as economic issues or political pressures (see their neo-variants), there is still a great tendency to deal with interest and identity as though one were dealing with stable determinants rather than with the enormous complexity of ideas, facts and beliefs (Heuser 2000). What escapes this analysis are interpretative processes.

Further, even some constructivists¹² – while refashioning the realist assumption of a priori interests and fixed identities by proposing that identities are socially constructed, and hence, vary according to social, political, and historical contexts¹³ – tend to assume that a (state’s) identity must first be in place before any political interest can be expressed and political action can be taken.¹⁴ This certainly offers a more inclusive understanding of the preferences leading to particular policy choices (as most eloquently captured by the Wendtian notion of ‘anarchy is what states make of it’),¹⁵ but it also diminishes identity to its effects and mostly excludes the possibility of providing an adequate account of the processes that expose how identity is in fact constructed and how it performs.

Critical social theory and poststructural approaches¹⁶ come closest to articulating the complexity of the concept of identity as understood here, in that they not only specify further the performativity of identity but also provide an ontological challenge to the assumptions of identity in its origin.¹⁷ In contrast to the realist conception, I contend that identity – while an inescapable condition of being – is neither simply (and already) ‘out there’ nor permanently fixed. The same can be said about its national variant; as opposed to some constructivists’ belief, and as centred mostly on Alexander Wendt’s understanding, that a state’s identity is formed through the process of interstate action, I maintain that national identity emerges – rather than being given – out of a process of representation. Much of this is based on Benedict Anderson’s (1991) effectively phrased notion of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, which exists only through the way it is represented as such within the boundaries of the state. This representation involves, though is not limited to, the use of dichotomised systems of references: Images of the ‘outside’ give meaning to the ‘inside’, the domains of the domestic are constituted through the ones of the foreign, the self through the other, and identity through difference.¹⁸ Thus, national identity, although recognised as the underlying dimensions of the meaning of the state, does not exist prior to it, but finds its representation outside the state boundaries.

With poststructualists, then, I agree on the next step of analysis: to illustrate how the textual and social practices are connected and to describe the implications of this connection for the way we think and act. There are many spheres in which this illustration can be exposed; one essential discourse is established in the practice of foreign policy and which constitutes a certain structure of knowledge, or axis of references (Foucault 1972), to legitimise security action.

Foreign policy and national identity

Why ‘identity and foreign policy’? The realist narrative that continues to govern much of our outlook on security debates, sees foreign policy as converging around a ‘state’s efforts to ward off threats from abroad and procure the wherewithal from the global community necessary to the realisation of goals’ (Rosenau 1987, 1). Most traditional scholarship has been content with seeing foreign policy explained as a state-centred phenomenon in which there is an internally recognised and articulated response to an externally formed military or economic threat. It follows, then, that conventional approaches to foreign policy are generally concerned with explaining why particular decisions, resulting in specific courses of action, were made. This is done to show that a certain policy decision was predictable and calculable given a particular set of circumstances. The outcome is an attempt to identify those circumstances so as to predict certain events with as much probability as possible (Little 1991). As Gustavsson (1999, 75) puts it, foreign policy can be understood as a ‘set of goals, directives or intentions, formulated by persons in official or authoritative positions, directed at some actor or condition in the environment beyond the sovereign nation state, for the purpose of affecting the target in the manner desired by the policy-makers’. Contrary to this, I argue here that foreign policy cannot, and must not, be seen as a result of a pre-given understanding of an outside existing threat; making such predictions ignores the fact that the identified foreign policy events or problems are always performative (political) acts – not facts.¹⁹ In other words,