How Dominant Narratives Rise and Fall: Military Conflict, Politics, and the Cold War Consensus

How Dominant Narratives Rise and Fall:Military Conflict, Politics, and the Cold WarConsensusRonald R. Krebs

Abstract Contemporaries and historians often blame the errors and tragedies ofUS policy during the Cold War on a dominant narrative of national security: the“Cold War consensus.” Its usual periodization, according to which it came together inthe late 1940s and persisted until the late 1960s when it unraveled amidst the traumaof the Vietnam War, fits well with a common theory of change in ideas and discourse.That theory expects stasis until a substantial unexpected failure (in this domain, militarydefeat) discredits dominant ideas and unsettles dominant coalitions. However, system-atic data reveal the standard history of this important case to be wrong. Based on alarge-scale content analysis of newspaper editorials on foreign affairs, this articleshows that the Cold War narrative was narrower than conventional accounts suggest,that it did not coalesce until well into the 1950s, and that it began to erode evenbefore the Vietnam War’s Americanization in 1965. To make sense of this puzzle, Idevelop an alternative theory of the rise and fall of the narratives that underpin and struc-ture debate over national security. Rooted in the dynamics of public narrative and thedomestic politics of the battlefield, the theory argues that military failure impedeschange in the narrative in whose terms government officials had legitimated themission, whereas victory creates the opportunity for departures from the dominant nar-rative. Process-tracing reveals causal dynamics consistent with the theory: failure in theKorean War, which might have undermined Cold War globalism, instead facilitated theCold War narrative’s rise to dominance (or consensus); and the triumph of the CubanMissile Crisis made possible that dominant narrative’s breakdown before the upheavalof Vietnam. This hard and important case suggests the need to rethink the relationshipbetween success, failure, and change in dominant narratives of national security—andperhaps in other policy domains as well.

For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article, I’m grateful to Jon Acuff, Ben Ansell, JimBaughman, Josh Busby, Nicholas Calabrese, Arjun Chowdhury, Shawn Cochran, Dara Cohen, GeoffDancy, Bud Duvall, Ben Fordham, Rebecca Friedman, Catherine Guisan, Ron Hassner, Arie Kacowicz,Ira Katznelson, Roee Kibrik, Charles Lipson, David McCourt, Alfie Marcus, Benny Miller, Ting Ni,Galia Press-Barnathan, Aaron Rapport, Brian Rathbun, Mark Raymond, Jack Snyder, Paul Staniland,Jeremi Suri, Jordan Tama, Marc Trachtenberg, Srdjan Vucetic, and especially David Edelstein andStacie Goddard; to audiences at seminars conducted at American University, Bar Ilan University,Brown University, Darmstadt Technical University, the Hebrew University, the University of Californiaat Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of Haifa, the University of Minnesota, and theUniversity of Southern California; to audiences at panels convened at meetings of the InternationalStudies Association and the Interuniversity Seminar on Armed Forces and Society; to my students atHebrew University and the University of Minnesota; and to IO’s anonymous reviewers and the journal’seditor. This project could not have been completed without the assistance of Kathryn Chylla, LindseyCunneen, Giovanni Mantilla, Ashley Nord, Aaron Rapport, Molla Reda, Rob Thompson, and especiallyGeoff Dancy.

International Organization 69, Fall 2015, pp. 1–37© The IO Foundation, 2015 doi:10.1017/S0020818315000181

Contemporaries and historians have often blamed the errors and tragedies of USpolicy during the Cold War—from military brinkmanship to imprudent interventionto alliance with rapacious autocrats and brutal rebels to an inflated defense budget—on the “Cold War consensus.” By this account, after around 1948, alternatives to mil-itarized global containment could not get a hearing. This entrenched policy consensusallegedly dragged the United States into a disastrous war in Vietnam and unraveledamidst the trauma of that war.1 However, the narrative of national security that wecall the Cold War consensus has not been studied rigorously. More systematic datareveal the standard history of this important case to be wrong. Based on a contentanalysis of newspaper editorials, I show that the Cold War narrative was narrowerthan conventional accounts suggest, that it did not become dominant until the early1950s—long after such oft-cited episodes as the Czech coup of winter 1948—andthat its dominant position began to erode in the early 1960s—well before the 1968Tet Offensive, which marked the American public’s decisive turn against theVietnam War.But rethinking what the Cold War narrative was and when it consolidated and col-

lapsed poses a substantial theoretical puzzle as well. A well-established, intuitivetheory attributes major change in ideas and discourses—across many domains, in-cluding national security—to substantial, unexpected, and unwelcome policy fail-ures; policy success, in contrast, impedes change, since prevailing ideas anddiscourses then seem to make adequate sense of reality.2 That theory fits nicelywith the contention that the Cold War consensus persisted until the Vietnam Warand then collapsed amidst that harrowing conflict. It fits less comfortably,however, with my data, which show that the Cold War narrative fell from its domi-nant perch long before Americans rejected the Vietnam War and that it surprisinglyachieved its dominance during the bloody Korean stalemate.To make sense of this pattern, I develop an alternative theory rooted in the dynam-

ics of public narrative and the domestic politics of the battlefield. I start from the con-structivist premise that events do not speak for themselves, that their purportedlessons are the product of interpretation by political actors, and that the critical junc-tures in which narratives are reconfigured are not productively theorized as responsesto exogenous shock.3 From that more deeply political foundation, I argue that failureand success have effects quite the opposite from existing theory’s expectations: thepolitics of protracted military failure impede change in the dominant national securitynarrative in whose terms leaders legitimated the mission, whereas victory creates the

1. For this conventional view of the Cold War consensus, see, among others, Allison 1970–71; Gelb andBetts 1979, chap. 6; Halperin, Clapp, and Kanter 1974, 11–12; Hoffmann 1978, chap. 1; and Hogan 1998,10–17.2. For general discussions, see Capoccia and Kelemen 2007; and Pierson 2004. On foreign affairs, see

especially Legro 2005, especially 29–35; and Welch 2005, 31–51. Regarding economic paradigms, seeHall 1993; industrial policy, Dobbin 1994; postwar associational life, Skocpol et al. 2002; and organiza-tional practice, Perrow 1984.3. See, similarly, Bially Mattern 2005, 56–60; Legro 2005, 28–35; and Widmaier, Blyth, and Seabrooke

2007.

2 International Organization

opportunity for departure from that narrative. Dominant national security narratives,such as the Cold War consensus, depict the protagonists and the setting of securitycompetition, defining the range of sustainable policy options: only those policiesthat can be effectively legitimated can be pursued. Their dominance endures aslong as leading political and cultural elites continue to reproduce them, and erodeswhen elites publicly challenge key tenets. However, early in an uncertain militarycampaign, battlefield setbacks give both doves (war opponents) and hawks (war sup-porters) in the opposition incentives to criticize the war’s conduct while reaffirmingthe underlying narrative. Opposition doves pull their rhetorical punches to avoidbearing the political costs of wartime criticism, whereas opposition hawks aremoved by the prospect of gain, but the effect is the same. In contrast, victorycreates an opening for its “owners” to advance an alternative: riding a politicalhigh, they can argue that, as a result of their wise policies, the world has changed,that a different narrative is now more apposite. In short, when it comes to public nar-ratives of national security, the conventional wisdom has it backward.This theory’s expectations and mechanisms are consistent with the quantitative

content analysis of newspaper editorials as well as with qualitative evidence fromthe Cold War. The disheartening Korean War facilitated the Cold War narrative’srise to dominance, whereas the triumph of the Cuban Missile Crisis made possiblethat narrative’s breakdown before the upheaval of Vietnam. The Korean War’shigh costs might have undermined the Cold War globalism in whose name theUnited States had gone to war. However, leading Republicans, who had resistedthe axiom that the world was so tightly interconnected that global security was indi-visible, now insisted that the war had resulted from the fact that the Truman admin-istration’s battle against communism had not been global enough. They thus helpedconsolidate the global Cold War they had long feared would yield an imperial pres-idency and an imposing national-security state. The Cuban Missile Crisis was seen atthe time as a one-sided victory for the United States and so, according to conventionaltheory, should have bolstered the dominant Cold War narrative. Republican hawksaccordingly took the crisis and its resolution as proof of that narrative’s core propo-sitions. However, the missile crisis also opened space for John F. Kennedy, who hadlong hewed in public to the Cold War narrative despite the more nuanced views heexpressed in private, to deviate publicly from that narrative and to lay the narrativefoundation for détente.This revisionist account of the Cold War narrative is intrinsically important, for it

speaks to enduring questions—from the origins of America’s national-security stateto the conditions of possibility for détente to the sources of US intervention inVietnam. But the Cold War narrative is also a prominent case. Hardly questioned nar-ratives often structure nations’ debates over security and foreign policy. We knowthem by shorthand expressions that encapsulate their portraits of the protagonists,scene, and action of a global drama: the Nazi obsession with “living space,” theGaullist vision of French renewal, the communist faith in capitalist aggression, theIranian Revolutionary regime’s Great and Little Satans, the Israeli discourse of “nopartner for peace,” and most recently the US “War on Terror.” These constitute

How Dominant Narratives Rise and Fall 3

what May called the “axiomatic” dimension of foreign policy: the “broad formulationthat fixes priorities and provides standards by which the appropriate choices amongalternatives may be made.”4 However, scholars have devoted most of their attentionto what May called the “calculated”: the level of effort expended, the scope of targets,the means employed. Even Legro, in his work on states’ ideas about internationalsociety, focuses on collective “causal beliefs” about the “effective means for achiev-ing interests” in international politics.5 The narrative underpinnings of policy debatehave received far less attention, yet are arguably more important.

Rethinking the Cold War Consensus

The conventional view is that a dominant Cold War narrative took shape in the late1940s. Lasting around two decades, it unraveled during the Vietnam War and failedto reemerge even as détente flickered in the mid-1970s. Scholars and contemporaryobservers alike identified Vietnam as “the acid that dissolved the postwar foreignpolicy consensus.”6 Others, however, believe there to have been no substantialchange throughout the post-1945 period.7 Such opposed stances persist because welack systematic evidence regarding what the consensus was, when it consolidated,and when it collapsed. Yet a shared public narrative is necessarily observable. Theevidence I have gathered suggests that there was an authoritative Cold War narrativethat defined the boundaries of legitimate politics in the United States, but that itscontent and dynamics were quite different from the usual account.The Cold War consensus was a public discursive code that American policy-

making elites felt compelled to adhere to in their public pronouncements, regardlessof their private qualms. This is what Gelb meant when he blamed the consensus fordriving the United States into the Vietnam fiasco; he knew manyWashington insidershad severe misgivings about key pillars of the consensus and its application toSoutheast Asia, but he also saw few who were willing to give public voice to theirprivate dissent.8 Despite persistent doubts at the highest levels of government thatglobal communism was “a highly coordinated, conspiratorial, malevolent force”and that local communists were mere ciphers doing Moscow’s bidding9—to thepoint that Gaddis has claimed that no US official ever really “believed in the exis-tence of an international communist monolith”10—rare was the policy-maker who

4. May 1962, 659.5. Legro 2005, 7 (emphasis added).6. Holsti and Rosenau 1986, 376–77. See also Allison 1970–71; Gelb and Betts 1979, chap. 6; and

Holsti and Rosenau 1984. Although Russett and Hanson found evidence in public opinion of the ColdWar consensus’s demise as early as 1960, they still portrayed Vietnam as the turning point; see Russettand Hanson 1975, 134–44.

7. See Bacevich 2007; and Craig and Logevall 2009.8. Gelb 1976.9. Selverstone 2009, 4.10. Gaddis 1987, 148.


openly challenged this representation of global communism before the early 1960s.They could not say otherwise if they wished to be taken seriously, or so they thought.Such public discursive codes normally take a narrative form,11 for stories are the

vehicles through which human beings define their reality and link thought toaction—through which they formulate and articulate identity (who self and otherare) and interest (what self and other want).12 Public narratives are ubiquitousbecause meaning-making is essential to the human condition and because legitima-tion is the life blood of politics.13 Only some narratives, however, become dominant,an accepted “common sense” about the world,14 and thus set the boundaries of whatactors can legitimately articulate in public, what they can collectively (though not in-dividually) imagine, and what is politically possible. As the terrain on which politicalbattle takes place, dominant public narratives do not fully smother contestation butchannel it. They privilege a range of policies and impede the legitimation ofothers, and fundamental change in national security policy—in its basic orientation,as opposed to the effort expended or the means employed15—hinges on change in thedominant narrative. More than private belief, public adherence sustains dominantnarratives: even those who disagree with their premises typically abstain frompublicly challenging them, for fear of being ignored or castigated. Participants inpolitical life—elected politicians but also bureaucrats, public intellectuals, andjournalists—must operate within those narrative boundaries if they wish to retainlegitimacy and respectability among broad audiences. Those who operate outsidethose limits consign themselves to irrelevance and even to punishment by relevantaudiences—voters and colleagues for politicians, senior officials for bureaucrats,and advertisers, readers, and power-brokers for publishers.16

As a dominant narrative, the Cold War consensus limited what policy optionscould be legitimately articulated. As Gelb and Betts observe, when it held sway,“debates revolved around how to do things better and whether they could be done,not whether they were worth doing.”17 However, it did not sustain only a singlepolicy approach. There was throughout the Cold War “a workable dissensus …

over how communism could best be combated”—via military measures or viatrade, aid, and development.18 Debate swirled even at the consensus’s alleged apexin the 1950s over the advisability of negotiating with the Soviet Union, the

11. Given space constraints, I cannot elucidate the nature of narrative or situate my conceptualization inthe literature. For further discussion, see Krebs 2015, chaps. 1–2.12. See Bruner 1990; Hammack and Pilecki 2012; McGee and Nelson 1985; and Ringmar 1996, chap. 3.13. On legitimation and foreign policy, see Barnett 1998; Goddard 2009; and Jackson 2006.14. Hall 1988, 8.15. These distinctions come from Hermann 1990.16. This is not to say that the average voter, newspaper reader, or advertiser pays close attention to

whether politicians and editorialists are conforming to the dominant narrative. Attentive elites play acrucial role in highlighting transgressions. On elite cuing in public opinion formation, see Page andShapiro 1992; and Zaller 1992.17. Gelb and Betts 1979, 190.18. Hughes 1980, especially 49–53.


wisdom of military intervention, and the value of spending more on defense andforeign aid.19 One cannot, therefore, apprehend this dominant narrative by examiningcongressional voting patterns on defense expenditures and foreign assistance, bindingalliances, and military interventions—that is, the policies associated with militarized,unselective containment.20 One cannot cite debate over policy as evidence of the con-sensus passing.21

Nor can one identify a dominant narrative by analyzing individuals’ beliefs re-vealed through opinion polls. This was the strategy of survey researchers in thelate 1970s, who contrasted the deep divides they discovered among Americanswith the putative consensus of the past.22 They admitted that, because sampling pro-cedures were flawed in the 1950s, they could not properly document that opinion hadbecome more fractured. But the problems with this method run deeper. First, opinionpolls are not neutral instruments for gauging the public’s views. Pollsters operatewithin the bounds of the respectable, and they embed narrative presuppositions intheir questions. They are better at detecting cleavages than establishing zones of con-sensus and identifying the limits of the legitimate.23 Second, and even more import-ant, the Cold War narrative’s dominance was rooted less in what individuals trulybelieved than in the stances they thought they could legitimately defend in public.

Measuring the Cold War Narrative

Dominant public narratives constitute the boundaries of legitimate politics. As aresult, one cannot ascertain whether a public narrative is dominant by looking toonly a single source, such as official government pronouncements, since that narra-tive may not be shared and since other narratives may retain legitimate standing. Norcan one look to politicians or media that address only narrow constituencies, sincebroader audiences might ignore or dismiss their views. Finally, one should look toa body of elite discourse present over the entire period to make possible comparisonsover time. These considerations suggest that one should observe the presence orabsence of a dominant narrative in a corpus of elite discourse that is relatively con-sistent and drawn from multiple sources. These sources should be within the palebut occupy distant, and ideally extreme, positions on the spectrum.To track the Cold War narrative, I undertook a longitudinal content analysis of edi-

torials on foreign affairs between the end of World War II (1945) and the dissolutionof the USSR (1991). They were drawn from two leading newspapers that inhabited

19. On these as part of the Cold War consensus, see Allison 1970–1971, 150–51, axioms 1–2, 6, 7,9; Halperin, Clapp, and Kanter 1974, 11–12, shared images 1–3, 11–14; and Holsti and Rosenau 1984,218–23, 230–32.20. As in, among others, Fordham 1998, 2002, and 2008.21. As in Holsti and Rosenau 1984, 2.22. See Holsti and Rosenau 1984; Russett and Hanson 1975; and Wittkopf 1990.23. Kegley 1986, 450–55.


opposed poles on the ideological spectrum, especially with respect to foreign affairs:the consistently internationalist and liberal New York Times and the reliably nation-alist and conservative Chicago Tribune. Although the length, style, and dailynumber of editorials varied between the two newspapers and over time, both ran edi-torials throughout the span on what they saw as the major issues of the day, includingforeign affairs. The database contains nearly 9,100 editorials on foreign affairs, anannual average of 87.4 from the Tribune (range: 42 to 142) and an annual averageof 101.8 from the Times (range: 33 to 188). Overall, 46.2 percent of the editorialscome from the Tribune and 53.8 percent from the Times. I look to these editorialsas reflections of a potentially dominant narrative and the changes it underwent, notas influential sources of narrative change. Major newspapers’ editorial stancesappear to follow national politicians in their ideological camp and have littleimpact on the median member of Congress.24

Based on existing catalogs of the Cold War consensus’ axioms, I constructed afourteen-point questionnaire on the editorial’s central concern, its representationsof communist powers and superpower competition, its portrait of US allies, itsstance on the domino theory, and its position on US leadership.25 Human coders com-pleted the questionnaire for each editorial in the database, with double-blind coding toestablish intercoder reliability.26 Because of the interpretive demands, intercoder re-liability rates are lower than ideal but nevertheless quite strong.27 When an element’sscores across the two newspapers are statistically indistinguishable (p > .05), orwhen statistically significant differences are substantively negligible, I identify itas a zone of narrative agreement and thus as part of the dominant narrative. To myknowledge, this is the first time anyone has disaggregated the Cold War narrativeinto its possible components and traced their prominence in public elite discourse.This method makes it possible to establish whether there was a dominant ColdWar narrative in the United States, what it consisted of, when it consolidated, andwhen it collapsed.28

24. Habel 2012.25. For the questionnaire, see the online appendix.26. Because of the project’s extensiveness, double-blind coding was not conducted for the full run of

both newspapers. An additional coder analyzed the first twenty editorials per year from each newspaper—at least 10 percent and sometimes nearly 50 percent of a given year’s editorials. This practice is standardwith large data sets. Thanks to Tim Johnson for guidance.27. Intercoder reliability tests indicate an average agreement of 78.04 percent across all questionnaire

items. Cohen’s kappa scores on individual items ranged from a low of .2337 to a high of .6656, with anaverage of .49. Although these rates of agreement exceed commonly cited minimum levels of acceptability(Stemler and Tsai 2008, 48), many statisticians are skeptical of efforts to interpret the magnitude of kappastatistics and to establish fixed conventions (see Krippendorff 2004; and Uebersax 2013). I also calculatedother measures of intercoder reliability, such as Scott’s pi and Krippendorff’s alpha. These were in the samerange; see the online appendix for details.28. In decomposing the Cold War narrative into its elements and abstracting from specific episodes, the

questionnaire deemphasizes plot in favor of protagonist. It does, however, capture general plot lines in itsexamination of editorials for representations of, among others, communist aggression, superpower compe-tition, the domino theory, and the impact of US intervention.


The study’s validity depends on three assumptions. First, the questionnaire repre-sents the Cold War narrative’s farthest possible reach. To design it, I drew from awide range of secondary sources, and the resulting list of questionnaire items is inclu-sive and extensive. I am unfamiliar with any elements commonly viewed as part ofthe Cold War consensus that do not appear on the questionnaire.Second, we cannot reasonably speak of a dominant national security narrative if

either of these two newspapers regularly departed from it. The New York Timesand the Chicago Tribune are two of only three newspapers nationwide that rankedin the top ten in circulation in every decade over the span.29 Both were widelyseen as “opinion leaders.” The Times was, for much of the period under study,tightly tied to the national establishment, had reporting resources that dwarfed itscompetitors, and was the only newspaper that elites felt compelled to read.30

Although the Tribune was not in the Times’s league, it was a highly regarded regionalpaper with a national profile.31 Both operated within the bounds of legitimate dis-course, and were acutely sensitive to how their reading publics and, crucially, adver-tisers responded to their editorial stances.32 The two newspapers were also unusuallyideologically consistent, especially on foreign affairs.33 One cannot classify a narra-tive as dominant if either the nation’s paper of record or the heartland’s spokespersondeviated from it.Third, these newspapers represent the boundaries of legitimate American views of

the global scene.34 It is conceivable that there were respectable papers whose foreignaffairs editorials endorsed key propositions later or diverged from them earlier ornever joined the consensus. I cannot discount this possibility fully without surveyinga broader range of news outlets and undertaking a similar content analysis. However,coding other newspapers would be prohibitively expensive, and it is not obvious whatother newspapers one should consult, for alternatives lacked long-standing nationalstatus and/or ideological consistency.35

Content Analysis Findings

The content analysis yields several novel empirical claims regarding the dynamics ofthe Cold War narrative. First, the dominant narrative, or consensus, of the 1950s was

29. Based on decennial data compiled from Editor and Publisher International Year Book; The WorldAlmanac and Book of Facts; and Information Please Almanac, Atlas, and Yearbook.30. Talese 1970, 121–24. See also Rosenau 1963, 186–202.31. See, for instance, Wendt 1979, 674; John Tebbel, “Rating the American Newspaper—Part II,”

Saturday Review, 10 June 1961, 55; “The Ten Best American Dailies,” Time, 21 January 1974, 66–72;“The Ten Best US Dailies,” Time, 30 April 1984, 64–72.32. For revealing episodes on the Tribune, see Wendt 1979, especially 750–57. On the Times, Diamond

1993, 139; Tifft and Jones 1999, 502; and Oakes Oral History, Part I, sess. 2, 23 January 1962, 50–51.33. Ansolabehere, Lessem, and Snyder, 2006.34. Thanks to Jeremi Suri for pressing me on this point.35. Thanks to James Baughman for consultation on these issues.


not nearly as broad as conventional accounts suggest. Second, this narrow narrativeachieved dominance later than the conventional wisdom claims—not in the late1940s, but into the 1950s. Third, its dominance began to erode in the early1960s—before the United States committed substantial forces to the defense ofSouth Vietnam and long before mass opinion turned against the war.First, there was a dominant Cold War narrative, or consensus, in the 1950s, but it

was narrow. The two newspapers’ editorials largely moved in lockstep regarding thecentrality of superpower competition for global politics; on this issue, the gapbetween them was small and stable.36 As Table 1 indicates, they agreed that the com-munist world was monolithic (see the row labeled “Communist unity”), that leadingcommunist powers were expansionist and aggressive (Communist aggressiveness),that the threat was real (Communist threat), that relations between the two blocswere generally conflictual (West-Communist relations), and that the domino theoryheld (Domino theory). Between 1945 and the early 1960s, the differences betweenthe two papers’ editorial stances on these five matters were either statistically insig-nificant (p > .05) or, when they were statistically significant, substantively negligible(3 percent or less, per the “Ratio” column). However, that is as far as the consensuswent. As Table 2 shows, throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the two papers’ edi-torials diverged over the reliability of allies (see the row labeled “Allies reliable?”),over whether the United States had special responsibilities as leader of the free world(Special US leadership role?), over the value of foreign assistance (Foreign aid valu-able?), and even over whether the United States had in the past acted (US past con-structive?), or would in the future act (US future constructive?), as a force for good inworld affairs. The Times had much greater faith than the Tribune in US allies, in theutility of foreign aid, and in the need for and virtues of US leadership in world affairs.These differences were statistically significant (p < .01) and substantively large (onaverage, 68 percent).Second, the usual periodization of even the narrow Cold War consensus is prob-

lematic: the consensus did not consolidate until well into the Korean War.37 Thisis strikingly reflected in the paltry amount of editorial coverage the Tribunedevoted, relative to the Times, to narrating the Cold War—to representing the freeworld’s adversaries and the nature of the global conflict. Between 1948 and 1955,48.3 percent of foreign affairs editorials in the Times identified the character of theleading communist powers, compared with just 28.7 percent in the Tribune; overthat span, 25.1 percent of foreign affairs editorials in the Times referred to theperils of states going communist, compared with just 13.6 percent in the Tribune.Between 1948 and 1952, 44.6 percent of foreign affairs editorials in the Times pre-sented a view of Western–Soviet bloc relations, whereas only 23.7 percent in the

36. Because of space limitations, I summarize many of the content analysis findings. Further supportingdata and graphical representations are in the online appendix.37. Important exceptions in the literature include Fordham 1998; and Snyder 1991.


TABLE 1. The Cold War consensus: Representations of the communist Other

Questionnaire itemSubstantive interpretation

of editorial scoreYearrange

Chicago Tribunenumber of editorials

New York Timesnumber of editorials

Chicago Tribuneaverage editorial score

New York Timesaverage editorial score p-value Ratio1

Cold War centrality 1: Central 1945–92 4,192 4,884 0.61 0.59 0.576 1.030: Not central

Communistaggressiveness

3: Aggressive 1945–62 477 1,170 2.97 2.92 0.035** 1.022: Both1: Peaceful

Communist threat 2: Real 1945–64 533 956 1.98 1.98 0.63 1.001: Inflated

West-Communistrelations

3: Conflictual 1945–62 493 1,050 2.77 2.84 0** 1.032: Mixed1: Cooperative

Communist unity 3: Monolithic 1945–60 613 1,281 2.98 2.95 0.007** 1.012: Both1: Diverse

Domino theory 1: Yes 1945–64 304 638 0.98 0.98 0.67 1.000: No

Notes: 1. Ratio is of higher to lower average editorial score. **Statistically significant: p < .05. †Substantively significant: > 10 percent.

TABLE 2. Limits of the Cold War consensus

Questionnaireitem

Substantive interpretationof editorial score

Yearrange





Allies necessary? 2: Necessary 1945–70 217 920 1.8 2 0** 1.11†

1: Not necessary

Allies reliable? 3: Reliable 1945–70 486 907 1.66 2.64 0** 1.59†

2: Contingent1: Not reliable

Special USleadership role?

1: Yes 1945–75 43 304 0.4 0.96 0** 2.40†

0: No

Foreign aidvaluable?

2: Valuable 1945–75 178 425 1.08 1.96 0** 1.81†

1: Not valuable

US pastconstructive?

2: Yes 1945–64 304 471 1.09 1.82 0** 1.67†

1: No

US futureconstructive?

3: Yes 1945–71 439 795 1.67 2.54 0** 1.52†

2: Contingent1: No


Tribune did. By the mid-1950s, the editorial coverage gap between the two papershad narrowed: the Tribune had joined the consensus.Third, the two papers’ articulated views did eventually diverge: as Table 3 indi-

cates, from the early- to mid-1960s through the end of the Cold War, statistically sig-nificant gaps (p < .01) arose between the two newspapers on every question that hadpreviously constituted the dominant narrative. The Tribune hewed to the traditionalCold War narrative, hardly diverging from its 1950s stance, whereas the Times devi-ated substantially. Those differences were substantively significant as well, averagingabove 17 percent (per the “Ratio” column). But they emerged before leading figuresin Congress, and before the American people, opposed the Vietnam War, and evenbefore the Americanization of the war in 1965. Figures 1 and 2, displaying thepapers’ editorial averages for communist powers’ aggressiveness and West-Communist relations, show this clearly. As the Vietnam War dragged on, therewas even less agreement on representations of the Communist other, but the trendpredates the war.38

Differences between the liberal internationalists at the Times and their conservativecounterparts at the Tribune were real and growing by the early 1960s, but the formerdid not adopt editorial stances diametrically opposed to the erstwhile consensus. It didnot represent the Soviet Union as a status quo power: between 1963 and 1975, itseditorials averaged 3.21 on the scale—somewhat closer to expansionist/aggressive(4) than to satisfied/peaceful (2). It did not cast Western-Communist relations asgenerally cooperative, but at best as involving a mix of cooperation and conflict:even in 1966–70, a period of sustained optimism, its editorials averaged 2.12 onthis question—close to a mixed-motive game (2) but slightly inclined toward zero-sum competition (3). It did not even decisively rebuff the domino theory, the pre-eminent legitimating logic of the VietnamWar: between 1965 and 1975, its editorialsmore often endorsed than rejected the claim that the United States should be con-cerned with other states “going communist,” averaging 1.60 (with 1.50 representingsubstantive indifference). These gaps were not trivial, but, comparing Tables 2 and 3,the differences between the two newspapers in the 1950s were four times larger thanin this new zone of dissensus.

Contending Explanations

The content analysis challenges the conventional historical narrative and periodiza-tion of the Cold War consensus. It is also theoretically puzzling: standard modelsof change in the basic ideas informing national security do not accord with its find-ings. One well-known theory attributes change to large-scale policy failure. By thisaccount, psychological, institutional, and social mechanisms mutually reinforce

38. For corresponding figures on the unity of communist powers and the domino theory, see the onlineappendix.


TABLE 3. Erosion of the Cold War consensus

Questionnaire itemSubstantive interpretation

of editorial scoreYearrange





Communistaggressiveness

3: Aggressive 1963–89 710 491 2.9 2.25 0** 1.29†

2: Both1: Peaceful

Communist threat 2: Real 1965–89 544 234 1.98 1.78 0** 1.11†

1: Inflated

West-Communistrelations

3: Conflictual 1963–89 777 633 2.66 2.42 0** 1.10†

2: Mixed1: Cooperative

Communist unity 3: Monolithic 1961–89 1110 654 2.85 2.39 0** 1.19†

2: Both1: Diverse

Domino theory 1: Yes 1965–89 426 147 1 0.85 0** 1.18†

0: No


stasis with respect to national security, as in other domains.39 Only during “criticaljunctures” can agents make meaningful choices that set a new course.40 To explainhow such moments of structural slack arise, scholars commonly invoke an exogenousshock that punctures stable equilibria and drives change in institutions and para-digms.41 In the national security arena, this normally takes the form of substantialbattlefield defeat. The most sophisticated account is Legro’s, arguing that a necessarycondition for the breakdown of dominant conceptions of how states should relate tointernational society is unexpected large-scale failure; success, even when unantici-pated, yields no impetus for change.42 This theory cannot make sense of a ColdWar narrative that coalesced in the early 1950s, amidst a frustrating war in Korea,and that collapsed a decade later, when there was no unsettling shock.

Fig.1-B/W

onlin

e,B/W

inprint

FIGURE 1. Aggressiveness of Communist powers

39. Welch 2005, 31–51.40. For an alternative view, see Mahoney and Thelen 2010.41. See note 2 for citations.42. Legro 2005, especially 29–35. See also Berger 1998, 22; and Lustick 1993, especially 122–24.


Second, national security narratives might straightforwardly reflect global realities,as structural realists would argue.43 Perhaps the Cold War narrative became dominantbecause it mirrored the bipolar structure of international politics, aggressive Sovietbehavior, and a tightly controlled Soviet orbit, and perhaps it lost its grip on US na-tional security debate because it was out of step with developments such as the Sino-Soviet split and Soviet moderation. The dominant Cold War narrative, however,came together only around Joseph Stalin’s death, and it was strongest afterward—when, under Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet bloc was becoming more diverse andSoviet policy growing more tolerant of difference. Moreover, contemporary realists

Fig.2-B/W

onlin

e,B/W

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FIGURE 2. West-Communist relations

43. Although structural realists, as confirmed materialists, would not put much stock in narratives, this isa fair extrapolation from the logic of the theory. Neoclassical realists agree that the international systemyields clear imperatives that states should obey, but they would acknowledge the possibility that some-times, and even often, dominant narratives of national security deviate from the system’s objective lessons.


such as George Kennan and Walter Lipmann, who were presumably most attuned tothe realities of global politics, took issue early on with the Cold War narrative’s viewof global communism as monolithic and of superpower competition as a zero-sumgame.44 Finally, according to this realist theory, a new narrative should havebecome dominant in the 1960s that reflected crucial changes in global politics,notably a divided communist world following the eruption of Sino-Soviet conflictand shared superpower interests following the resolution of the Cuban MissileCrisis—but none did.Third, perhaps national security narratives shift course along with presidential ad-

ministration. When new presidents come into office, they often bring a differentvision of global politics, conception of the national interest, and foreign policy prior-ities, a different group of advisers on whom they are reliant, and a different set ofmajor contributors to whom they are (somewhat) beholden, especially when thenew president comes from another political party.45 Leaving aside the partisan pres-idential account’s overall merits, it does not fit the Cold War narrative’s dynamics.The key periods of change do not correspond to changes of presidential administra-tion or party control of the White House. Those have been too frequent, and some keychanges have occurred during times of partisan presidential stability.The puzzle of the Cold War narrative’s rise and fall is all the greater when one con-

siders the events surrounding the nodal periods of change. They coincided with thetwo signal events of the first half of the Cold War: the Korean War, which was thefirst large-scale US military engagement of the bipolar era, which settled into abloody stalemate, and which Americans experienced as deeply disappointing andchastening; and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was the closest the two superpowerscame to direct military confrontation and whose resolution Americans across the pol-itical spectrum saw as an unprecedented success. The consensus consolidated amidst(perceived) military failure, and began to erode after (perceived) victory in a majorepisode of coercive diplomacy. This outcome is theoretically surprising, but it isnot a coincidence. The Cold War narrative rose to dominance not despite butbecause of the poor US performance in Korea, and its dominance slipped notdespite, but because of, the seemingly one-sided US triumph over the USSR in Cuba.

Public Narrative and the Politics of the Battlefield

Both realist and historical institutionalist accounts of change are typically insuffi-ciently sensitive to politics. Because realists implicitly adopt rationalist models ofbelief updating, whereas institutionalists believe all institutions and discourses aresticky, or tend to endure, they differ over how much discrepant evidence is requiredbefore learning occurs. However, both typically treat events as exogenous and as

44. Gaddis 1982, 25–53, 89–109; and Steel 1980, 466–76.45. See, for instance, Spiegel 1985; and to some extent Gaddis 1982.


proving policies and ideas right or wrong. This article begins from the constructivistpremise that although events—from natural disaster to economic recession to militaryconflict—are unquestionably real, their social import is not determined by any oftheir objective features. Whether an event is seen as a shocking crisis or manageableproblem is endogenous to political contestation. As Hay writes, “crises are constitut-ed in and through narrative.”46

If dominant narratives coalesced and collapsed in response to objective shocks, itwould make sense to conceptualize collective learning as an epiphany—per the insti-tutionalist literature. The prevailing image of substantial failure, including battlefielddefeat, as a moment of intellectual awakening is apt when defeat is overwhelming andwars are extremely short. But the collective perception of even major defeats nor-mally comes together only at the end of a protracted process in which actors seekto make sense of accumulating setbacks. Few military contests have ended as deci-sively as World War II did for Germany and Japan, and even substantial battlefielddefeats have permitted interpretations, such as the “stab in the back,” that legitimatedrather than rejected the past. Although it is true that short wars are more common thaneven scholars generally realize,47 most wars provide ample opportunity while combatis raging for debate over their lessons. Diverse approaches figure crises as times ofnational unity beyond politics,48 but protracted conflicts are rife with disputes overthe military’s stumbles, which, the logic of path dependence suggests, conditionthe scope and direction of subsequent change. Both the emergence and breakdownof dominant narratives are deeply political processes.Even when victory and defeat are clear,49 accounting for these outcomes and as-

sessing their implications are normally matters of intense public debate—not justin retrospect, but in the moment. As battlefield travails come to light, domestic polit-ical contestation centers on how to explain them. Is the army being outgunned or out-smarted? Does it lack fighting spirit, or did the nation’s leaders dispatch it to anunwinnable war? Does the problem lie in tactics or strategy, or with the war’s funda-mental rationale and thus with the national security narrative in whose terms leadershad legitimated the war? Political elites are not equally empowered in these publiccontests. Government spokespeople enjoy substantial starting advantages in the exer-cise of “interpretive leadership,”50 and because they own the military campaign,victory redounds to their benefit. Military setbacks, however, erode public trust,diffuse authority, and empower the opposition, and thus opposition leaders’ rhetoricaldeployments are most crucial in this context.Opposition elites’ rhetorical choices have profound narrative implications.

Because dominant narratives require continual reproduction, and because they

46. Hay 1996, 254.47. Weisiger 2013, 2.48. Albeit for different reasons—for realists because the stakes are then so high, and for securitization

theorists because of the discursive power of crisis.49. Though there is evidence that they often lie in the eye of the beholder. See Johnson and Tierney 2006.50. Widmaier 2007.


always contain contradictory strands that make possible the remaking of commonsense, these elites can, broadly speaking, explain the nation’s battlefield travailseither by reproducing the security narrative in whose terms the campaign had beenlegitimated or by charting a new narrative path. Both permit criticism of the govern-ment, but when opposition elites opt for the former, they reinforce the dominant nar-rative, and when they opt for a new path, they help undermine it. They are of coursenot the only producers of culture, authorized to remake the boundaries of the legiti-mate, and indeed activists and intellectuals are often the progenitors of alternativenarratives. But those alternatives remain sidelined until political elites take themup. As the literature on securitization has emphasized, not everyone “can ‘do’ or‘speak’ security successfully.”51 Public debates rarely take place on level playingfields, especially in the national security domain—where publics mostly look to of-ficial sources, and especially the executive branch, for the production of meaning.52

Whether elites publicly give voice to other narratives of national security dependson whether the alternatives are compatible with their established political identity andwhether they see it as politically profitable. Although opposition elites’ rhetoricalchoices are thus to some extent contingent, they are partly the product of a predictablepolitical environment. Early in a faltering war whose ultimate outcome is uncertain,all contestants, stylized here as doves and hawks, as opponents and supporters of mil-itary action and hard-line policies, have incentives to ground their criticisms in thelegitimating national security narrative and thereby to preserve or consolidate itsdominance. The politics of failure inhibit the opposition from jumping through amore ambitious rhetorical window and pursuing change in the narrative in whoseterms the military operation had been publicly justified. As a result, national securitynarratives survive even substantial failures.This conclusion derives from a view of political action as both cultural and stra-

tegic.53 Doves and hawks operate within a common social environment withshared cultural toolkits they draw on to make public sense of events. But they arealso strategic actors seeking to further their political fortunes via their public accountsof the conflict’s course. To put strategizing political elites at the center of the dynam-ics of a national security narrative is not to reduce dominant narratives to elitestrategizing alone. Whether elites can advance specific security narratives dependson more enduring structures of national identity discourse, in which those narrativesmust be grounded. At any given nodal point, the range of legitimate rhetorical movesis limited, due in part also to past elite rhetorical deployments.54 Although neithernational identity discourse, nor rhetorical consistency, nor strategic incentives

51. Buzan, Wæver, and Wilde 1998, 27.52. For related arguments and evidence from rhetoric and communication, see Perelman and Olbrechts-

Tyteca 1969, 53; from psychology, see Kruglanski 2004, 112–13, 124–26. This is related also to the “twopresidencies” thesis: see Wildavsky 1966.53. The following melding of strategic and cultural action draws on Swidler 1986.54. Contrast this to a more purely rationalist account of the politics of public rhetoric in Riker 1986 and

1996.


render political action entirely predictable, this article rests on the wager that, inthe context of a failing military venture, both those pressures and the dangers ofbucking them are fairly clear and intense. I thus expect the following contingent gen-eralizations often to hold, but there remains an irreducible element of choice, ofagency.55

Consider first political opponents who oppose the war. Doves confront a difficultchoice: to seize the opportunity that military struggles provide to assail the underlyingnarrative, or to offer a more modest attack on the war that reaffirms that narrative. Forinstance, the surprising persistence and effectiveness of the Sunni insurgency in Iraqcreated an opening for Democratic doves to take on the George W. Bush administra-tion. They could have exploited US struggles in Iraq to confront the Terror narrativethe Iraq invasion had been bound into. But they also could have criticized the IraqWar from safe narrative terrain—as a distraction from the “real” War on Terror,against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. When leadingDemocrats opted for the second course, they disappointed many supporters, buttheir choice was not surprising in light of the fog of war and the politics of militaryfailure.When evidence of military difficulties has begun to accumulate but before the per-

ception of irrevocable failure has crystallized, doves are reluctant to launch a thor-ough critique of the war’s underlying narrative. Criticism in wartime is alwaysdangerous, but the deeper it strikes, the more vulnerable critics are to charges thatthey are emboldening the enemy, demoralizing the troops, and prolonging thefight. This is especially true early in a war, when its outcome is still seen as uncertainand when vocal criticism arguably can affect whether the war ends in victory ordefeat, not just the inevitable conclusion’s terms and costs. Should the war’scourse reverse, critics’ judgment will be severely questioned, and should thenation’s forces continue to flounder, critics may be held responsible, not lauded fortheir prescience. Given the stakes, it is far safer for doves to criticize the war’sconduct, insist that the strategy’s application alone is flawed, or propose withdrawalbecause of excessive cost or insufficient likelihood of victory. As a result, even as thewar’s costs mount, doves typically express themselves within the terms of the dom-inant narrative. Politics does not stop at war’s edge, at least not for long, but wartimepolitics is normally waged within narrative bounds.These political dynamics, narrowing the scope of criticism in a campaign’s early

stages, have long-term consequences. Once there is widespread agreement ofdefeat—that is, beyond the tipping point of failure—doves might find it appealingin principle to recast the narrative basis of national security, but that option is nolonger available. Their past utterances, which reproduced and reinforced the domi-nant narrative, have established the conventions the public expects members of the“responsible opposition”—in both government and civil society—to adhere to.Those who move beyond those boundaries of legitimate critique, to embrace an

55. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for urging me to clarify my stance.


alternative narrative of national security, are predictably assailed as reckless radicals.Were doves to know in prospect what they know in retrospect, they might coupletheir wartime criticism to a revision of the nation’s security narrative. But thepolitics of an uncertain and failing war cast narrative alternatives to the margins inwar’s early stages—where they remain. This mechanism of lock-in is at work notonly when the political opposition’s leadership is stable, but even when militarydefeat shakes up the established order and brings new personalities into politicswho are not personally shackled by a wartime rhetorical past. Wishing to avoid theradical label, politicians and pundits alike are confined to the dominant narrative.Even Barack Obama, who more than any other top Democrat made opposition tothe Iraq War the centerpiece of his political persona, remained in thrall to theTerror narrative as a senator and presidential candidate. He joined other leadingDemocrats in criticizing the IraqWar as having obstructed theWar on Terror properlyconceived.56

Now consider political opponents who support the war. Hawks face a seemingdilemma. On the one hand, they do not wish to undermine public support for thewar, which may already be flagging: were they to challenge the war’s legitimatinglogic, the public might lose faith entirely. On the other hand, they wish to exploitbattlefield setbacks for political gain: supporting the policies and echoing the argu-ments of the wartime leadership will not position them as a credible political alterna-tive. To sidestep the dilemma they can accuse the government of not having beensufficiently faithful to its articulated worldview and suggest that greater fidelitywould have led to better battlefield outcomes, or even made the war and its attendantsacrifices unnecessary. Criticizing the war’s conduct and presenting themselves astrue believers, hawks seek to renew the mass public’s commitment, redouble the mili-tary’s efforts, and offer the public a distinctive political stance. Opposition hawksthus make political headway, albeit at the cost of principle if their hawkish preferenc-es are rooted in a different narrative of national security from that of the wartime gov-ernment. In contrast to opposition doves, who seek to evade the perils of criticism,hawks are lured by the prospect of gain. However, the effect is the same: to shoreup the underlying narrative of national security. In fact, the politics of militaryfailure can work to consolidate narrative dominance, when hawks are enticed tosign on to a narrative they had previously refused to endorse.Although the politics of military failure stifle change, success on the battlefield

and in significant episodes of coercive diplomacy opens space for departures fromthe dominant narrative. This is counterintuitive from the perspective of actors’motives.57 But motive is only half the story, and triumph alters the opportunitystructure facing those in both government and civil society who wish to narrate theworld differently but previously felt politically constrained. Success boosts the inter-pretive authority of both government spokespeople and their civil society allies,

56. For details, see Krebs 2013, 69–71.57. Legro 2005, 33.


loosening those constraints and permitting them to advance their preferred alter-native. It creates an opening for its owners to argue that the rules of the globalgame have changed because the policy they advocated or implemented was sosuccessful. Success does not end narrative dominance, but it makes its breakdownpossible—depending on whether doves or hawks occupy positions of authority:doves can reveal their true colors, while hawks are free to continue toeing the narra-tive line. Success is not, however, conducive to the consolidation of a new dominantnarrative because it creates space for alternative futures without delegitimizing thepast. It has not only many fathers, but many lessons: it can also be interpreted asproving the wisdom of the status quo from which deviation is dangerous. The erst-while dominant narrative retains its legitimacy, and so, even when doves seize theopportunity that success provides, the result is at most the erosion of narrativedominance.This theoretical framework helps make sense of the peculiar dynamics of the

Cold War narrative. The protracted war in Korea—frustrating to Americans freshafter World War II, sure of their rectitude and power, and confident that theirwealth and know-how guaranteed swift victory—might have led to the rejectionof globalist underpinnings, but the Republican Party leadership composed ofhawkish conservatives behaved in line with theoretical expectations. Worriedabout undercutting the war effort yet eager to strike political gains, they abandonedtheir preferred narrative that denied the world’s tight interconnectedness. In assail-ing the Truman administration for having left East Asia to communist predation—that is, for pursuing a containment policy that was insufficiently global—theydeprived a nonglobalist alternative of its leading voices and helped consolidatethe Cold War consensus. A decade later, the Cuban Missile Crisis allowed theliberals who took credit for that triumph to articulate a different vision of theSoviet Union, global communism, and the possibilities of détente. Duringthe Cold War, superpower crisis is what passed for the battlefield, and the admin-istration’s victory created an opening, which Kennedy eagerly seized. The CubanMissile Crisis made possible the demise of the Cold War narrative’s decade-longdominance.

Consolidation: The Korean War and the Nationalist Alternative

The dominant Cold War narrative took shape through the marginalization of alterna-tive narratives propounded by accommodationists and conservative nationalists.Accommodationists, such as former Vice President Henry Wallace, shared withCold Warriors internationalist premises—the indivisible nature of global security,the need for allies, the imperative of US leadership, the potential for constructiveUS engagement—but they differed in their representation of the adversary, theirunderstanding of local conflicts, and the nature of superpower relations.Conservative nationalists could not be outdone when it came to anticommunism,but they accepted neither global interconnectedness nor a special US role in global


affairs. Accommodationists fell silent after the outbreak of war in Korea, whichseemed to confirm a Moscow-driven communist agenda of aggression.58

The Korean War, however, need not have been fatal to the conservative nationalistnarrative of national security. The North Korean invasion seemed to confirm theiranticommunism, but it did not inherently undercut their skepticism of a globalCold War. In fact, the public’s frustration with the costly stalemate could have bol-stered their challenge to Cold War premises, as Secretary of State Dean Achesonfeared.59 In human terms, the war was overall nearly as costly for the UnitedStates as the subsequent war in Vietnam—on an annualized basis, even more so.60

The Korean War became deeply unpopular after Chinese forces crossed the YaluRiver and a bloody deadlock set in,61 and Republican politicians repeatedly soughtto exploit the public’s frustration for political gain.62 So desperate were Americansto bring the boys home that the war hero and presidential candidate DwightEisenhower’s vague promise, “I shall go to Korea,” won them over in 1952.63

Even as the war’s memory faded, Americans continued to see it as a waste ofblood and treasure: the most popular reason to support Republican candidates in1956 was that the party had extricated the country from Korea.64 There is thusgood reason to think that the war’s course could, if not should, have led to the rejec-tion of its legitimating Cold War logic and redounded to the conservative nationalistalternative’s benefit.Yet the opposite occurred. By war’s end, globalist premises ruled US foreign

affairs debate: the Cold War consensus had consolidated, the nationalist narrativecast to the periphery. Conservative nationalists, however, who then dominated thecongressional Republican leadership, had only themselves to blame. As militarysetbacks in Korea accumulated, they did not invoke them as evidence of the follyof a militarized, US-led global crusade against communism—which would have ac-corded with their narrative of global politics and with their domestic priorities.Rather, consistent with my theoretical expectations for opposition hawks amidst a fal-tering military campaign, they exploited military misfortune for political gain by

58. On their transformation into Cold Warriors, see Meyers 2007, 291–98; and Paterson 1971.59. Acheson 1969, 494.60. A slightly higher percentage of serving US soldiers were killed and wounded in the course of the

Korean War (2.4 percent) than the Vietnam War (2.3 percent). As a percentage of total population (atthe start of the war), however, the cost in battle deaths and wounded was slightly higher in Vietnam(.103 percent) than in Korea (.090 percent). However, because the Korean War was much shorter thanthe Vietnam War, its annualized human cost was far greater. Calculated from figures in Chambers II1999, 849; and US Census Bureau, Historical National Population Estimates, 1 July 1900 to 1 July1999, <http://www.census.gov/popest/data/national/totals/pre-1980/tables/popclockest.txt>, accessed 30September 2014.61. Mueller 1971.62. See Caridi 1968; Casey 2008; and Kaufman 1986, 49–52, 97–98, 121–29, 165–79.63. On that declaration’s decisive impact, see, for contemporaries’ assessments, Divine 1974, 74–76,

82–84. Among scholars, see Bernstein 1971, 349–50; Caridi 1968, 234; and Donovan 1982, 401.64. Gallup Poll #568, Questions 15–16, 1 August 1956, available at <http://brain.gallup.com/documents/

questionnaire.aspx?STUDY=AIPO0568&p=2>, accessed 30 September 2014.


http://www.census.gov/popest/data/national/totals/pre-1980/tables/popclockest.txt

http://www.census.gov/popest/data/national/totals/pre-1980/tables/popclockest.txt

http://brain.gallup.com/documents/questionnaire.aspx?STUDY=AIPO0568&p=2



trying to outdo the Cold Warriors in their enthusiasm for a global Cold War. Takingthe Truman administration to task for waging its global crusade inconsistently andineptly, they shunted aside the nationalist alternative they held dear.At first, conservatives rallied ’round the flag: every Republican senator—even as

orthodox a nationalist and as harsh a critic of Truman as Senate Minority LeaderKenneth Wherry of Nebraska—supported the administration.65 But they held trueto their vision even as they rallied. Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the unquestionedparty leader and the nation’s most prominent conservative politician, challengedthe legitimating globalist logic: the independence of Korea, he declared, was not avital US national security interest, and the choice to draw the line there against com-munist aggression was arbitrary.66 The Chicago Tribune spoke for many conserva-tives in objecting to the president’s apparent belief that “it is the duty of theUnited States to oppose the spread of Russian communism anywhere, at anytime.”67 There was clearly no consensus on the nature of the post–war world inwinter 1950–51, when Republican elder statesman and former president HerbertHoover initiated the so-called Great Debate over permanently stationing US forcesin Europe. Calling on Americans “to preserve for the world this Western hemisphereGibraltar of Western Civilization,” Hoover challenged the liberal internationalistclaim that the fabric of global politics was so tightly interwoven that security was in-divisible. The communists, he reasoned, “can no more reach Washington in forcethan we can reach Moscow.” Even in a world in which Soviet-led communismwas on the march, the United States could thrive “indefinitely” and could, regrettably,concede areas to communist domination.68

Yet the Great Debate marked the last roar of conservative nationalism, whichwould soon be strangled by the politics of Korea. In contrast to Hoover, whose pol-itical time had passed, younger leading conservatives readily sacrificed their nation-alism on the altar of political expediency. Eager to score gains against anadministration already on the ropes, Taft privately strategized just a month into thewar that “the only way we can beat the Democrats is to go after them for their mis-takes.… There is no alternative except to support the war, but certainly we can pointout that it has resulted from a bungling of the Democratic administration.”69

Conservative Republicans, hawks in the political opposition, followed Taft’s play-book for more than two years. They not only cast Korea as the latest debacle, follow-ing the loss of China and of the US atomic monopoly, but they invoked the dominotheory to explain it: by selling out the nationalists in Formosa (Taiwan), Truman hadinvited aggression in Korea and perhaps soon in Indochina.70 Even Harold Stassen,

65. Caridi 1968, 35–38.66. Wunderlin 2006, 167–72.67. “A Popular War So Far,” Chicago Tribune, 30 June 1950. See also Caridi 1968, 116–20.68. Hoover 1955, 3–10, 11–22.69. Quoted in Patterson 1972, 455.70. For examples, see Caridi 1968, 39–49, 54–56, 84–85; Kepley 1988, 85–89, 93–96; and Patterson

1972, 453–54, 475.


the normally moderate former governor of Minnesota and a serious presidential con-tender, could not restrain himself: the war, he advised in November 1950, resultedfrom “five years of coddling Chinese Communists, five years of underminingGeneral MacArthur, five years of snubbing friendly freedom-loving Asiatics, andfive years of appeasing the arch-Communist, Mao-Tse-Tung.”71 In short, theDemocrats had not been sufficiently faithful to the logic of the Cold War. Thiswas hardly a new line of attack for Republicans, who spat out “Yalta” as if theword itself were evidence of Democratic perfidy, but the Korean War gave itrenewed impetus and, crucially, a new Asian twist.Unlike the party’s “China bloc,” the orthodox Republican Right of Taft, Wherry,

and Speaker of the House JosephMartin had previously shown as little interest in com-mitting US resources to East Asia as to Europe.72 After North Korea’s invasion,however, they discovered a long-lost love of Asia, and they enthusiastically backedGeneral Douglas MacArthur, who called for escalating the war to China and whomTruman cashiered in April 1951. MacArthur was an orthodox if extreme ColdWarrior, whose commitment to Asia followed from the logic of the global ColdWar: if containment was necessary in Europe to prevent Soviet aggression, and USmilitary forces needed to be beefed up there, aggressive containment was equally war-ranted in Asia, especially when capable Nationalist Chinese were eager to join in. Thedeep interconnectedness of global politics, he warned Martin in a letter that becamepublic, required the United States to beat back communism in Asia: “If we lose thewar to Communism in Asia, the fall of Europe is inevitable. Win it, and Europemost probably will avoid war and yet preserve freedom.” His view of the Cold Warwas unselective: “I believe we should defend every place from Communism. Ibelieve we can. I believe we are able to,” he testified to Congress.73

MacArthur’s stance was attractive to opposition hawks for obvious reasons: itscored political points without harming the war effort.74 Conservative Republicans,however, could not follow MacArthur and preserve their opposition to the globalCold War. After all, for MacArthur, the chief problem with the administration’spolicy was that it was not global enough. Moreover, only by reproducing the logicof the global Cold War could hawks make their criticisms stick; if global securitywere divisible and if the battle against Communism were correspondingly selective,the administration’s lack of resolve in East Asia may not have been very consequen-tial. Thus in May 1951 Taft echoed MacArthur in declaring that his quarrel was “withthose who wished to go all out in Europe, even beyond our capacity, and at the sametime refuse to apply our general program and strategy to the Far East.” The adminis-tration’s half-hearted commitment to the Cold War, Senator William Jenner ofIndiana charged in fall 1951, had produced a “treadmill war.”75 Had they been

71. Quoted in Caridi 1968, 95.72. See Kepley 1988, 49–50, 61, 131; and Zelizer 2010, 99.73. Quoted in Kepley 1988, 126.74. For similar interpretations of the Republican Right, see Caridi 1968; and Kepley 1988.75. Caridi 1968, 163, 183, and, for other examples, see 112–13, 116–20, and 153–59.


true to their principles, members of the Republican Right should have pressed to scaleback US efforts in Asia, but instead they endorsed the expansion of what they hadpreviously condemned as an illogical and unaffordable policy. As the long-time pac-ifist A.J. Muste observed ironically, “For isolationists, these Americans do certainlyget around.”76 In a July 1951 private letter, Taft admitted that his endorsement of anaggressive global Cold War was political in design: MacArthur may not be complete-ly right when it comes to foreign policy, he wrote, but “we cannot possibly win thenext election unless we point out the utter failure and incapacity of the presentAdministration to conduct foreign policy and cite the loss of China and the Koreanwar as typical examples of their very dangerous control.”77

Once the Republican old guard had so publicly endorsed the global Cold War, theconservative nationalist narrative of national security not only lost its most prominentspokesmen, but descended into the realm of the irrelevant and irresponsible.Downplaying the threat posed by global communism and portraying global securityas divisible—pillars of the nationalist alternative narrative—were clear signs that onewas not serious and respectable. Thus by 1953 few conservatives elected to nationaloffice still publicly voiced reservations to Cold War globalism. Shortly after enteringoffice, Eisenhower noted in his diary with pleasant surprise that, when it came toforeign policy, he and Taft never disagreed “academically or theoretically”—onprinciples—only on questions of application to and implementation in specificcases.78 Even Hoover had by the middle of 1954 given up the fight against theglobal Cold War: “Our dangers from the Communist source of gigantic evil areunending,” he insisted.79 If conservatives needed any reminder of the boundariesof legitimation in the early 1950s, they just had to look at the remaining old progres-sives, who generally railed against the global Cold War and found themselvesignored, dismissed as “hick provincials” and renegade isolationists.80

Conservative intellectuals were also coming to terms with the new reality. In themid-1950s, the National Review led the intellectual effort to fuse Burkean conserva-tism and antistatist individualism under the banner of anticommunism. The promi-nent libertarian Murray Rothbard ruefully recalled that, by the mid-1950s, “oldlibertarian and isolationist compatriots who should have known better … [and]who used to scoff at the ‘Russian threat’ and had declared The Enemy to beWashington, D.C. now began to mutter about the ‘international Communist conspir-acy.’”81 The globalism that nationalist hawks embraced in the midst of the KoreanWar had real costs, for it proved “a devil’s bargain” that undermined their visionof the state.82 Unable to deny the government the resources it needed to wage the

76. Quoted in Patterson 1972, 482. See also Radosh 1975, 156.77. Quoted in Patterson 1972, 491.78. Quoted in Ferrell 1981, 242.79. Hoover 1955, 79.80. Griffith 1979, 346–47.81. Rothbard 2007, 127.82. Zelizer 2010, 6. See also Critchlow 2007.


global struggle, conservatives gave their blessing to the national-security state. The OldRight’s maneuvering in the shadow of the KoreanWar paved the way for the rise of theglobalist, interventionist New Right of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.The Old Right never did shake the isolationist label, however. So pilloried, they

were a useful foil to Cold Warriors in both parties. Taft’s ill-deserved reputation asa doctrinaire conservative would serve him well though in the wake of theVietnam War. Critics of the US intervention in that Asian conflict would proclaimthe much-maligned Taft a “sober, wise, and realistic voice” who had warned of thedangers of the Cold War.83 It is more than a little ironic that the Cold War consensusis perhaps Taft’s most significant historical legacy.

Collapse: Cuba and the End of the Cold War Consensus

This Cold War narrative’s dominance, however, lasted only about a decade.Beginning in 1963, while the Chicago Tribune remained faithful to that narrative,the New York Times’ assessment of communist aggressiveness declined substantially;its judgment of Western-Communist relations moved much closer to a mixed-motivegame; and it more often thought the communist threat exaggerated. It was not defeatin Vietnam but triumph in Cuba that allowed liberal internationalists to drift from theCold War narrative. However, as expected, conservative Cold Warriors continued totoe the old Cold War line, and they charged liberals with naively confusing a tacticalflash in the pan with enduring strategic change.Liberal activists and intellectuals had for years been poking holes in the Cold War

narrative.84 Behind closed doors, some officials, including Kennedy himself, ques-tioned key elements, especially the zero-sum nature of superpower competition. Ina background interview in 1959, Kennedy noted that what impeded the twopowers from achieving a more stable modus vivendi was less Soviet ideology or am-bition than preconceptions and miscommunication: “You have two people…who areboth of goodwill, but neither of whom can communicate because of a language dif-ference.”85 In his March 1962 draft Basic National Security Policy, Walt Rostow, thehead of Policy Planning, observed that “it may become increasingly possible to make[the Soviets] feel that we share a common interest in the exercise of restraint”; theircommunist system did not guarantee war and did not preclude “constructive partici-pation.”86 This view at times influenced Kennedy’s decision making: during the Bayof Pigs operation, he refused to authorize air cover for the exiles because he fearedprovoking Soviet action against Berlin, which struck Eisenhower and RichardNixon as a naïve reading of the sources of Soviet aggression.87

83. Radosh 1975, 195.84. See Matusow 1984; and Suri 2003, 93–105, 121–30.85. Quoted in Beschloss 1991, 20. See also Gaddis 1982, 198–236; and Halberstam 1969, 14–24, 60.86. Quoted in Gaddis 1982, 228.87. Beschloss 1991, 133, 144–46.


However, these stirrings on the margins and in private rarely penetrated main-stream public discourse before the Cuban Missile Crisis. The major exception wasthe Sino-Soviet split, whose importance experts and policy-makers publicly recog-nized by the early 1960s, and they perceived centrifugal forces—“polycentrism”

was the inelegant term—elsewhere in the communist world.88 In general, however,the Times’s editorials on foreign affairs remained faithful to Cold War axioms, andthe Kennedy administration’s public rhetoric continued to hew to Cold War ortho-doxy. The gap between the president’s private musings, which displayed a “mentalityextraordinarily free from preconceived prejudices,” and his public rhetoric startledformer Ambassador to the USSR Chip Bohlen.89 Pressure from the Right, reinforcedby the administration’s own Cold War rhetoric, kept Kennedy from closing that gap:Khrushchev “would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure fromhis hard-line crowd… I’ve got similar problems,” he told Norman Cousins, editor ofthe Saturday Review.90

What permitted liberal internationalists to begin deviating from the dominant ColdWar narrative around 1963? Not large-scale failure, but success—specifically whatseemed to be an unambiguous US triumph in an episode of coercive diplomacythat was the closest to date the two superpowers had come to blows: the CubanMissile Crisis. Although we now know that the resolution of the crisis was a negoti-ated outcome in which the United States accommodated Soviet and Cuban concerns,the administration successfully went to great lengths to keep secret its agreement toremove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey.91 Perhaps afraid that, under pressure, theSoviets might reveal the Jupiter deal, Kennedy and other officials refrained from pub-licly gloating, and they asked for the press’s cooperation. However, the prevailingview at the time across the political spectrum was that Kennedy had scored a greatvictory, and journalists had difficulty exercising restraint. As Rovere wrote in TheNew Yorker at the time, it was “perhaps the greatest personal diplomatic victory ofany President in our history.”92

According to the Times, “reason prevailed” in October 1962—not because theUnited States suddenly saw the light, but because the Soviet Union finally camearound to the long-standing American view of the nuclear balance of terror.Kennedy had “made clear time and again” that violence was not a rational tool ofpolicy in a nuclear-armed world, and it was “encouraging” that Khrushchev nowagreed. The two sides had not stepped back equally from the brink: Khrushchevhad suffered a “humiliating defeat” in Cuba that he would never live down, whileKennedy deserved “the chief credit … [for] the fateful decision to confront Soviet

88. Laqueur and Labedz 1962.89. See Beschloss 1991, 62–65, 70; Gaddis 1982, 210–212, 232–35; Giglio 1991, 45; and Halberstam

1969, 13.90. Quoted in Beschloss 1991, 588.91. Nash 1997, 141–60, 166–67.92. Beschloss 1991, 542, 547–49, quote at 568. For review of reaction to the crisis’s resolution, see also

Dobbs 2008, 337; George 2003, 103–5; and Weisbrot 2001, 188–91, 193.


Russia head-on” and for his prudent display of “American military might and firm-ness of purpose.”93 His resolve had brought about not merely tactical adjustmenton the Soviets’ part, but “a turning point in the cold war” heralding an era of“great détente.” Under the shadow of mutual assured destruction whose implications,thanks to liberal Cold Warriors, both superpowers now grasped, liberal internation-alists at the Times looked forward to the possibility of ending the Cold War. Ayear later, they affirmed that strategic change was a fact, not “mere wishful think-ing.”94 Thus, when negotiations stalled in 1963–64 and the Soviets adopted a hardline, the Times interpreted this not as evidence of Soviet duplicity (as they had inthe past) but as “ritualistic” posturing to appease Peking. Once a skeptic of negotia-tions, the Times had become an unequivocal advocate: “as long as the Russians arewilling to talk, the possibilities of agreement exist, and we must continue toexplore them.”95

Afterward, the Kennedy administration also felt free to articulate publicly andmore consistently a vision for transcending the Cold War, which it linked expresslyto the crisis.96 In mid-December the president told the public in a nationally televisedinterview that Khrushchev had finally “showed his awareness of the nuclear age[,]…of the dangers of the United States and the Soviet Union clashing over an area of vitalimportance.”97 In an address at American University in June 1963, Kennedy forth-rightly challenged the Cold War narrative, calling on Americans to reexamine theirmost basic attitudes “toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union,toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.”Mirroring concerns he had long expressed privately, Kennedy shared his fear ofnuclear holocaust arising less from Soviet aspirations to world domination thanfrom a security dilemma: “a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion onone side breeds suspicion on the other.” The danger of nuclear war derived from“a distorted and desperate view of the other side,” from the “trap… [of] see[ing] con-flict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothingmore than an exchange of threats.” Only after the Cuban Missile Crisis couldKennedy preach publicly what he had preached privately—that the superpowersshared “a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting thearms race” and that this interest trumped both ideological commitments and legiti-mate conflicts of interest.98

93. See the following New York Times editorials: “A Triumph of Reason,” 29 October 1962, A28;“Khrushchev’s Sober Speech,” 20 July 1963, A18; “Khrushchevism Sans Khrushchev?” 17 October1964, A28; “The Days That Shook the World,” 4 November 1962, E8; “The Side of the Hill,” 16January 1963, A5; and “The Changing Atmosphere,” 3 October 1963, A34.94. See “A Triumph of Reason,” and “As We Step Back from Danger,” New York Times, 30 October

1962, A34.95. See “The Changing Atmosphere,” and “Focus on Germany,” New York Times, 14 June 1964, E8; and

“Test Talks with Moscow,” New York Times, 26 April 1963, A34.96. Gaddis 1982, 234–35. Also see Giglio 1991, 219.97. Kennedy 1962.98. Kennedy 1963.


Victory in the Cuban Missile Crisis freed liberals from the strictures of the ColdWar narrative. It opened political space for them to narrate the world in public theway many had behind closed doors. For the American University address, speech-writer Theodore Sorensen drew on draft language that had been deleted fromearlier major addresses, at the inauguration and at the United Nations in 1961, forbeing in those days too great a departure. As Beschloss notes, “there was not a sen-tence in this speech with which [Kennedy] would have privately disagreed in 1960.The change was not in Kennedy but in what he perceived to be his political environ-ment.”99 That vision did not become more sustainable simply because the crisis wokeAmericans up to the dangers of a nuclear-armed world. Although it amplifiedAmericans’ fears of nuclear holocaust, Cold Warriors had previously grasped thatmutual assured destruction gave the superpowers a common interest in avoidingdirect confrontation. This premise underlay the Eisenhower administration’sembrace of “massive retaliation,” which presumed that the Soviets would heedAmerican threats, if only in extremis. That the Soviets backed away from the brinkin Cuba was consistent with Cold War expectations and did not necessarily meanthat they were open to genuine dialogue and a permanent settlement. That inferencewould have been reasonable if the Soviet Union had substantially changed its behav-ior after the crisis. But the USSR took few concrete steps in the months after October1962 to alter that view.100

However, the Cuban Missile Crisis equally lent itself to another interpretation: thatit revealed the wisdom of staying the course. For conservative Cold Warriors at theTribune, the outcome of the missile crisis was a great success, a “Red backdown,”and they even had complimentary things to say about the president’s “unexpectedshow of … firmness.”101 But the fact that the missile crisis had occurred at allsimply confirmed how implacable the Soviet Union was and how dangerous itwould be to negotiate with such a deceitful foe: it reinforced the dominant ColdWar narrative. The crisis, conservatives argued, demonstrated the imprudence ofdeviating from the path of strength.102 Before long, many, including Nixon andRepublican Party Chairman George H.W. Bush, were taking the administration totask for allowing the Soviets to maintain a troop presence on the island.103

Whereas liberal internationalists around the globe greeted the crisis’s end withhope, the retired Eisenhower, hardly a rabid Cold Warrior, warned against such opti-mism, citing a history of communist trickery and insisting that “the conflict of ideas,ideologies which defines what we have called the cold war, will continue.” Months

99. Beschloss 1991, 600, and generally 597–601.100. For evidence on postcrisis Soviet policy, see Garthoff 1989, esp. 133.101. “Russia Now Favors Inspection,” Chicago Tribune, 29 October 1962, 16. See also “Getting Back

on Our Own Feet,” Chicago Tribune, 25 October 1962, 18.102. “Our Course Is Set,” Chicago Tribune, 23 October 1962, 14.103. See Beschloss 1991, 564–68, 581–83; and Weisbrot 2001, 189–91.


later, the Tribune labeled the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty a “delusion” and a “snare.”104

Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen agreed that the president’s aspirations for atest ban treaty constituted a “renunciation of the policy of strength,” which hadproved its worth in Cuba.105

Consistent with theoretical expectations, even as the triumph of the Cuban MissileCrisis made possible the dissolution of the Cold War consensus, it did not yield a newone. Conflicting interpretations regarding US adversaries, superpower relations, andthe magnitude of the threat were equally sustainable in its wake. The battles overVietnam at home took place on a narrative terrain that had already begun to fracture.

Conclusion

This article has a dual agenda. On the one hand, it offers a reinterpretation of an im-portant historical case. It shows that the narrative of national security that historiansrefer to as the Cold War consensus became dominant later, and lost its dominantstanding earlier, than conventional accounts suggest. On the other hand, it also re-thinks theoretically why and how major institutional and ideational change takesplace. The Cold War consensus should have been an easy case for two commontheories: that dominant narratives reflect global realities, and that only large exoge-nous shocks undo dominant narratives. My data on the Cold War narrative, however,confound realist and institutionalist expectations. To make sense of the Cold War con-sensus, I advance a more deeply political theoretical account. When it comes to publicnarratives in the national security domain, failure and success have surprising effects:military setbacks discourage elites from challenging the dominant narrative, whereasvictory loosens the opportunity structure and permits deviations from that narrative.This theory accords more closely both with the quantitative content analysis and withqualitative evidence from the Korean War and the Cuban Missile Crisis.This article’s novel account of the Cold War consensus has implications for at least

three enduring puzzles of US policy during the Cold War. First, for US state de-velopment, from one vantage point, it is surprising that the Cold War did notproduce a garrison state. However, from another perspective, the puzzle is why theCold War brought about a broad and deep national-security state and military-industrial complex despite antistatist traditions in the United States. The OldRight’s abandonment during the Korean War of the nationalist narrative opposingColdWar globalism provides part of the answer. Second, regarding the changed char-acter of superpower conflict, a more rule-governed superpower relationship emergedafter the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it did not derive directly from mutual heightenedawareness of the dangers of nuclear armageddon. It hinged, in the United States, on

104. See “Ike Counsels No Relaxing in Wake of Crisis,” Chicago Tribune, 30 October 1962, 11; and“Test Ban Treaty,” Chicago Tribune, 27 July 1963, N12.105. Hulsey 2000, 176–80, quote at 177.


the demise of the earlier Cold War narrative’s dominance. That too is a legacy of theCuban Missile Crisis. Third, concerning the Vietnam War, scholars now know thatlarge-scale US military intervention in Southeast Asia was not a direct result ofCold War groupthink. Had a new consensus taken shape in the wake of the CubanMissile Crisis along the lines Kennedy envisioned, the charge of having “lost”Vietnam would have had little resonance, and President Lyndon Johnson mighthave avoided escalating US involvement in a war he thought unwinnable. But thatindictment continued to resonate in the mid-1960s, with tragic consequences. Thisarticle explains why no new consensus consolidated in the wake of the triumph ofthe Cuban Missile Crisis.Whether my counterintuitive theoretical argument travels beyond the Cold War

and beyond the United States remains to be seen. It is true that, unlike othernations, the United States, by virtue of its geographical position and the absence ofpeer competitors in its hemisphere, normally has been located far from the battlefieldand somewhat shielded from the costs of war. But distance has not led Americans tolook on the nation’s faraway wars with equanimity, and these wars, even whenlimited in scope, have resonated powerfully in American politics.106 The politicalstakes of war are at least as great when the battle rages nearby, and wars on one’sown territory can still be protracted, end indecisively, and be subject to multiple in-terpretations. Despite the unusual US geopolitical position, there is little reason tothink that its experiences with respect to national security narratives are unusual.There was of course something distinctive about the Cold War superpower rivalry,conducted under conditions of bipolarity and in the shadow of nuclear armageddon.However, those factors should, if anything, have rendered national security narrativesmore responsive to presumptive global realities and less subject to the logic of nar-rative politics. The ways in which the Cold War was an outlier make it an especiallyhard case, which should give greater credence to the theoretical claims.Although space constraints preclude much consideration of the argument’s cross-

national applicability, it is common for political oppositions to criticize military oper-ations from the safe terrain of the dominant narrative. Everywhere the nativesproved ungrateful for the graces of liberal empire. But their continual resistance,and the imperial forces’ regular setbacks, typically led to questions about methodsand means, rarely to fundamental challenges to the imperial enterprise and its civiliz-ing mission. The initial stages of the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 were so dis-astrous that it came to be known in Israel as the mehdal—the failure—despite thesubsequent operational triumphs. However, the oft-heard charges of complacency, ar-rogance, and poor judgment directed at the political and military leadership and theintense demand for political accountability resulted in no fundamental rethinking ofIsrael’s strategic environment, strengthened the right and the rhetoric of siege, and leftthe dominant narrative largely intact. France’s floundering in Indochina and Algeriain the 1950s led to constitutional change, but opposition leader and then President

106. See, among others, Sherry 1997; and Zelizer 2010.


Charles de Gaulle’s calls for the restoration of French grandeur were rhetorically con-servative, framed as an adjustment of means, not ends. EvenMikhail Gorbachev, whoas a junior Politburo member in 1979 bore little responsibility for the invasion ofAfghanistan and who as premier shared his Politburo colleagues’ pessimism thatthe Soviet Union could stabilize that country, was reluctant to break with hisnation’s dominant Cold War narrative: he long hesitated to withdraw Soviet forcesfrom Afghanistan because he expressly feared it would harm the Soviet Union inthe continuing superpower competition for Third World allegiances. I leave it toothers to explore these and other cases and to identify scope conditions beyondthose mentioned earlier: the extent and rapidity of military defeat.The same dynamics were also at work in American politics in the decade after 9/11.

The administration of President George W. Bush sold the Iraq War by binding ittightly into the War on Terror. One might have expected the Terror narrative tohave met its end in the sands of Iraq, just like the US military’s travails inVietnam supposedly shattered the Cold War consensus. One might have expectedthe administration’s Democratic opponents to jump at the chance to articulate a dif-ferent narrative of national security. I have argued in this article, however, that al-though wartime setbacks shift narrative authority to the opposition, oppositiondoves are hesitant to break with the war’s underlying rationale. This is preciselywhat leading Democrats did.In line with this article’s theory, setbacks on the Iraqi battlefield undercut the au-

thority of the Bush administration, and more generally the Republicans, with respectto national security.107 However, even as US forces in Iraq faced an increasinglysophisticated and effective insurgency and even as the insurgency morphed into asectarian civil war, leading Democrats left the underlying Terror narrative untouched.Even as they stridently criticized a war they had once supported, leading Democratsdid not launch a frontal assault on the War on Terror. Instead, they cast the Iraq Waras a betrayal of the War on Terror properly conceived, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.They might have seized the opening the Iraq War provided to argue that terrorism wasa concern, but no longer preeminent; that counterterrorism should not take pride ofplace above all other foreign policy initiatives; that a war against terror and violentextremism was misguided; and that 9/11 did not mark a fundamental change inglobal politics. But few Democratic leaders did. As a result, the Terror narrativemaintained its dominant position for much of the decade—even though anothermass-casualty attack on US soil did not take place, even though both US overseasadventures and its domestic counterterror campaign had proved extremely costly, andeven though the public had soured on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The wartimepolitics of failure curbed the degree to which Democrats confronted the Terror nar-rative.108 Their rhetorical choices amidst a failing war whose outcome remained un-certain were understandable, but they thereby missed an opportunity to alter the

107. Goble and Holm 2009.108. For fuller treatment of this case, see Krebs 2013; and Krebs 2015, chap. 8.


narrative terrain of US national security. If Democrats complain that the War on Terrorlasted too long, and in ways is still with us, they partly have themselves to blame.

Supplementary Material

Supplementary material for this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0020818315000181.

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How Dominant Narratives Rise and Fall: Military Conflict, Politics, and the Cold War Consensus

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