Natalie Bormann - National Missile Defence and the Politics of US Identity: A Postcultural Critique

A poststructural critique

Copyright Natalie Bormann 2008

The right of Natalie Bormann to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN 978 0 7190 7470 7

First published 2008

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

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

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

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

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