Political and moral myths in American foreign policy: the neoconservative question
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The United States, under the two presidential terms of George W. Bush, entered in two major wars and saw enacted a series of controversial anti-terrorism measures (warrantless wiretapping, military prison at Guantanamo Bay, the use of enhanced interrogation techniques [torture]). In light of these extreme policies in post-September 11 America, much attention has been paid to the neoconservative ideology and its shaping of Bush Administration policy. Appropriately, opponents of the policies of the Bush administration including John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008 have suggested a return to a traditional American foreign policy, emphasizing military restraint and multilateral cooperation. Underlying these appeals is the notion that neoconservatism represents a break from American foreign-policy tradition, an aberration that can be reversed. The approach in this essay instead treats neoconservatism not as an aberration in American thought, but as a virulent strain of the enduring American ideology, chiefly exceptionalism. The recurring moral motifs in America's foreign policy are examined, with particular focus on the Cold War era and the subsequent post-Soviet era, which culminated in today's War on Terror. It is further argued that the recurring rhetorical themes of US foreign policy its moral example, its democratic mission, permanent threats to democracy were drawn upon to justify the War on Terror, and more particularly, the Iraq war. Because of the nature of the enemy in this case (Islamofascists in their parlance), this American narrative took on interesting mutations, stressing the supposed medievalism and backwardness of the enemy which drew upon well-established Orientalist motifs and stereotypes; the selling of the war was hence facilitated by these cultural reference points, which characterized America's War on Terror as a struggle between modernity and the premodern.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".