How has the continuing pursuit of national missile defence (NMD) been possible in the United States over the past three decades? Or, more provocatively, “why choose to deploy an enormously costly, technologically unfeasible (to date), and politically controversial defence project in response to a, much questioned, missile threat?” (vii). From Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative to the creation of the Missile Defense Agency, these questions form the catalyst for a rich, complex, and compelling account of the cultural politics of American security practices in Natalie Bormann's book National Missile Defence and the Politics of US Identity: A Poststructural Critique.
Eschewing orthodox approaches that limit discussion of NMD to contrasting the merits and demerits of its deployment within the commonly recognized frameworks of military-strategic analysis, Bormann draws upon a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of politico-cultural theory – notably Michel Foucault and Judith Butler – to provide a critical analysis of the acts of power and performativity underpinning the processes of NMD development. She convincingly argues that to understand the strategic, political, and cultural importance of NMD, one must examine a range of discursive representations that have rendered “missile defence meaningful” (8). Thus, beyond the techno-strategic discourses found in intelligence dossiers, national security strategies, academic analyses, and official proclamations, she draws our attention to everyday cultural artefacts like film, video games, and sport that are productive of the geopolitical imaginaries underpinning the assumed necessity of an NMD system within American policy circles.
Her central argument is that if we are to understand its resiliency in American geopolitical imaginaries, we must pay attention to the ways in which NMD as a security framework enables and “reassures US identity” (23) against enemies who are perceived to be doggedly pursuing the capability to annihilate the American homeland and way of life. Applying the Foucauldian maxim that discourses are “practices that systematically form the objects of which we speak” (25), Bormann is able to reveal how NMD serves as an integral nodal point in the discursive construction of threats as meaningful objects to be managed through American security policy. She argues, contra epistemic realism, that rogue states and processes of nuclear and ballistic missile technology proliferation are not simply pressing dangers that exist “out there” independent of our thoughts about them. Rather, rogue states and their accompanying discursive representations as irrational, unpredictable, unruly, and therefore resistant to the constraints imposed by conventional nuclear deterrence have been produced through dominant American foreign-policy outlooks. And it is these very same outlooks that now position NMD as a commonsense response to nuclear proliferation amongst these actors.
Bormann is clear to distinguish that her point is not that regimes like Iran or North Korea are unproblematic or that the spread of ballistic missiles with nuclear capabilities should be welcomed. Her position is far more reasoned: we need to pay attention to how these actors, technologies, and phenomena are framed as certain kinds of problems as opposed to others and how these framings are imbricated within a national politics of identity. From this perspective, NMD as a discourse not only identifies threats through processes of “othering” but also reinforces a charitable view of the American self while propagating the notion that there is no political problem (e.g. the spread of nuclear weapons in conditions where deterrence no longer holds) for which a narrowly focussed technological solution cannot be found. As such, interwoven into her genealogical exploration of NMD is also an interesting account of the performative enactment of American national identity in the nuclear age.
National Missile Defence and the Politics of US Identity is an important book. In bridging the disciplines of international relations and cultural studies Bormann shatters any preconceptions that these disciplines may have of each other or of themselves. She persuasively shows that there can be – and ought to be – more to the analysis of security than “counting bombs” and foregrounds the importance of cultural analysis to understanding the complex uncertainties of international relations. In sum, Bormann makes a compelling case that we need to consider “how various forms of representation have helped to give particular meaning to what appears in need of being permanently secured” (144). In doing so, she identifies the aporias that might just allow for “more inclusive and critical discussions of US thinking on security and national missile defence” within the American and global public spheres.
