Rhetoric Legitimation and Grand Strategy

Security Studies
ISSN: 0963-6412 (Print) 1556-1852 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsst20
Rhetoric, Legitimation, and Grand Strategy
Stacie E. Goddard & Ronald R. Krebs
To cite this article: Stacie E. Goddard & Ronald R. Krebs (2015) Rhetoric, Legitimation, and
Grand Strategy, Security Studies, 24:1, 5-36, DOI: 10.1080/09636412.2014.1001198
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2014.1001198
Published online: 11 Mar 2015.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 4458
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Citing articles: 24 View citing articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fsst20
Security Studies, 24:5–36, 2015
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0963-6412 print / 1556-1852 online
DOI: 10.1080/09636412.2014.1001198
Rhetoric, Legitimation, and Grand Strategy
STACIE E. GODDARD AND RONALD R. KREBS
This introductory framing paper theorizes the role of

legitimation—the public justification of policy—in the making of
grand strategy. We contend that the process of legitimation has
significant and independent effects on grand strategy’s constituent
elements and on how grand strategy is formulated and executed.
Legitimation is integral to how states define the national interest
and identify threats, to how the menu of policy options is consti-
tuted, and to how audiences are mobilized. Second, we acknowl-
edge that legitimation matters more at some times than others, and
we develop a model specifying the conditions under which it affects
political processes and outcomes. We argue that the impact of legit-
imation depends on the government’s need for mobilization and a
policy’s visibility, and from the intersection of these two factors we
derive five concrete hypotheses regarding when legitimation is most
likely to have an impact on strategy. Finally, we explore who wins:
why legitimation efforts sometimes succeed in securing public as-
sent, yet at other times fall short. Our framework emphasizes what
is said (the content of legitimation), how it is said (technique), and
the context in which it is said. We conclude by introducing the
papers in this special issue, revisiting the larger theoretical stakes
involved in studying rhetoric and foreign policy, and speculating
about how changes in the technologies and sites of communica-
tion have, or have not, transformed legitimation and leadership in
world politics.
Stacie E. Goddard is Jane Bishop ‘51 Associate Professor of Political Science at Wellesley
College. She is the author of Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and
Northern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Ronald R. Krebs is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Min-
nesota. He is the author most recently of Narrative and the Making of U.S. National Security
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
5
6 S. E. Goddard and R. R. Krebs
After al Qaeda crashed three airplanes into the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon in September 2001, the George W. Bush administration cast the
United States as a blameless victim, represented the perpetrators as evildoers,
and proclaimed a “Global War on Terror” (GWOT). It was not foreordained
that this understanding of the day’s events, the protagonists, and the US
response would become dominant. Many criticized the administration for
having declared war on terrorism, rather than on a specific ideology or
organization, and others for its having declared war, rather than adopting a
law-enforcement paradigm. These critics saw the administration’s rhetorical
choices as fateful: as a rhetorical device, the GWOT, they argued, imparted
legitimacy to al Qaeda and lent itself to accusations of a war on Islam.
Within a few years, even some in the Bush administration saw the GWOT
as a liability.
Unlike many scholars of international relations, participants in the pro-
tracted controversy over the GWOT believed that it matters what actors say
in global politics. This special issue of Security Studies seeks to demon-
strate the value of making public talk central to the study of international
relations, and it focuses on a specific form of public talk, legitimation, in a
single substantive arena, grand strategy. By legitimation, we mean how po-
litical actors publicly justify their policy stances before concrete audiences,
seeking to secure these audiences’ assent that their positions are indeed le-
gitimate and thus potentially to garner their approval and support. Scholars
of international relations often dismiss rhetorical contestation as meaningless
posturing, unworthy of serious analysis, especially when it comes to the high
politics of state security. The contributors to this special issue disagree. And
they are not alone: politicians the world over devote substantial material
resources and political capital to rhetorical battle, in implicit recognition that
legitimation shapes the fate of political projects, from the welfare state to
national security. This special issue sides with the politicians—not because
the world of politics is a genteel debating society, whose participants politely
puzzle over the central issues of the day, but because it is a political contest
with very real consequences. To sustain this claim, this special issue takes on
the “hard” case of grand strategy. The contributors analyze classic puzzles
in the history of international security—among others, how the Concert of
Europe produced peace, why Britain failed to balance against Nazi Germany,
why the United States was slow to enter World War II—to show that, even
in these well-trod cases in which the stakes were high, leaders’ justifications
of their actions and policies were crucial to explaining the outcome.
Grand strategy is an arena in which realism, rationalism, and materialism
have long held sway. Realists and liberal rationalists have shown little inter-
est in legitimation because they see it as but window-dressing for interests
and power. Although legitimacy features centrally in constructivist accounts
of foreign policy, that literature has shown more interest in how already
legitimate norms and ideas drive and constrain foreign policy than in how
Rhetoric, Legitimation, and Grand Strategy 7
actors go about rendering particular policies legitimate.1 This special issue

starts to fill that large gap. To do so it builds upon recent literature that has
returned language to the analysis of international politics and foreign policy,
including the study of international security.2 We further that agenda in two
ways. First, we seek to show that legitimation has significant and autonomous
causal effects on grand strategy: that the legitimation process is integral to
how states define the national interest and identify crucial threats, to why
certain remedies seem more viable than others, and to the mobilization of
domestic publics. Second, we go beyond the simple but important claim that
“rhetoric matters” to explain why legitimation matters more at some times
than others and why some legitimation attempts succeed while others fail.
This introductory essay proceeds as follows. First, we unpack and put
into dialogue our two core concepts—grand strategy and legitimation—and
explain how the latter shapes the former. We then develop a model spec-
ifying the conditions under which legitimation affects political processes
and outcomes. We argue that the impact of legitimation depends on the
government’s need for mobilization and a policy’s visibility, and from the in-
tersection of these two factors we derive five concrete hypotheses regarding
1 However, on normative change, see Neta Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics:
Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs About the Use of Force (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2003); Richard Price, “Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society
Targets Land Mines,” International Organization 52, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 613–44; Nina Tannenwald,
The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007). There is also a large, relevant literature on the legitimation of global
institutions: see, among others, Jens Steffek, “The Legitimation of International Governance: A Discourse
Approach,” European Journal of International Relations 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 249–75; Achim Hurrelmann
et al., eds., Legitimacy in an Age of Global Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Dominik
Zaum, ed., Legitimating International Organizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
2 Contributions to this linguistic turn have drawn inspiration from many sources. From Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s language games, see K. M. Fierke, Changing Games, Changing Strategies: Critical Investi-
gations in Security (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing
the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2006); from Louis Althusser’s mechanisms of articulation and interpellation, see Jutta Weldes, Con-
structing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999); from Jacques Lacan’s writings on representational force, see Janice Bially Mattern,
Ordering International Politics: Identity, Crisis, and Representational Force (New York: Routledge, 2005);
from Jürgen Habermas’s model of communicative action, see Thomas Risse, “‘Let’s Argue!’: Communica-
tive Action in World Politics,” International Organization 54, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 1–39; Jennifer Mitzen,
Power in Concert: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2013); from Erving Goffman and symbolic interactionism, see Michael N. Barnett, Dialogues in
Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); from Charles
Tilly and relational analysis, see Daniel H. Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Re-
ligious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2009); Stacie E. Goddard, Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and Northern Ire-
land (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); from rhetorical pragmatics, see Markus Kornprobst,
Irredentism in European Politics: Argumentation, Compromise, and Norms (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2008). Contributors to this special issue are similarly diverse in their sources of inspiration
and in their theoretical commitments.
when legitimation is most likely to have an impact on strategy. Third, we

explore who wins: why legitimation efforts sometimes succeed in securing
public assent, yet other times fall short. Our framework emphasizes what is
said (the content of legitimation), how it is said (technique), and the context
in which it is said. But the real theoretical work on this question is done
by the research articles themselves, which we then summarize and situate
within the logic of the collective project. We conclude by revisiting the larger
theoretical stakes and by speculating on how changes in the technologies
and sites of communication have, and have not, transformed legitimation
and leadership.
CENTRAL CONCEPTS: GRAND STRATEGY AND LEGITIMATION
In Paul Kennedy’s well-known formulation, grand strategy brings a nation’s

military, economic, and social resources into alignment with its ends abroad.3
It is, as Barry Posen puts it, “a state’s theory about how it can best ‘cause’
security for itself.”4 That theory weaves together four constituent elements.
First, grand strategy suggests a national interest—that there is a collective
entity that strategy seeks to secure and that there are national ends that
must be aligned with national means. Second, grand strategy identifies the
key threats to the state and prioritizes among them, allowing some to be
treated with equanimity or even ignored and singling out others as requiring
a vigorous response. Third, grand strategy devises affordable ways to address
those threats. Even relatively small states have numerous military, economic,
and diplomatic tools at their disposal, and grand strategy helps identify the
mix of tools and the investments required to ameliorate national insecurity.
Even great powers do not have unlimited resources, and grand strategy must
balance ends with always-limited means. Finally, the execution of grand
strategy rests on mobilizing needed resources at home and maneuvering
diplomatically abroad to attract allies and neutralize opponents.
How Legitimation Shapes Grand Strategy

This special issue’s core claim is that legitimation is essential to the process
through which grand strategy’s four constituent elements take shape and thus
through which grand strategy is both formulated and executed. Through this
process, the national interest is defined, threats are identified and prioritized,
3 Paul Kennedy, “Grand Strategy in War and Peace: Toward a Broader Definition,” in Grand Strategies
in War and Peace, ed. Paul Kennedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 1–2.
4 Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World
Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 13. See, similarly, Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation
for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 1.
the menu of policy options is constituted, and audiences are mobilized.

That claim goes beyond the now commonplace view that legitimacy matters
to world politics in general and to grand strategy in particular. Certainly
constructivists, sensitive to the social fabric of international life, have drawn
the most consistent attention to the power of legitimacy.5 But realists and
liberal rationalists too have come to agree that states generally value their
reputation for being upstanding, rule-following members of the international
community. Because hegemony that rests on coercion alone is costly, two
leading realists argue, powerful states seek to cultivate legitimacy for the
global rules they favor.6 Prominent realists now acknowledge that a state
that flagrantly violates international norms in its pursuit of security appears
threatening.7 Liberal rationalists similarly suggest that both legitimate and
illegitimate behavior in foreign policy potentially reveal a state’s “type.”8 Yet
North American scholars of international relations have shown less interest in
legitimation—that is, the public claim, rooted in publicly acceptable reasons,
that particular policy positions and concrete actions are justified. This is
puzzling because legitimacy must rest on, and be the product of, effective
legitimation.9 Action can be legitimate only if actors claim legitimacy and only
if audiences grant those claims. This special issue is unified by the conviction
that legitimation is often central to politics in general and to grand strategy’s
four constituent processes in particular.
1. Defining the national interest. The national interest remains one of the
most contested concepts in international relations. Realists, both structural
and neoclassical, assume that the national interest flows unproblematically
from the competitive pressures of international politics.10 Because liberals
5 See, among others, Mlada Bukovansky, Legitimacy and Power Politics: The American and French
Revolutions in International Political Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Ian Clark,
Legitimacy in International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Ian Hurd, “Legitimacy
and Authority in International Politics,” International Organization 53, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 379–408;
Christian Reus-Smit, American Power and World Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
6 Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and
the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 207.
7 Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (New York: W.
W. Norton, 2005), 229, 247.

8 Christopher Gelpi, The Power of Legitimacy: Assessing the Role of Norms in Crisis Bargaining
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 17; Jack L. Goldsmith and Eric A. Posner, “Moral and
Legal Rhetoric in International Relations: A Rational Choice Perspective,” Journal of Legal Studies 31, no.
1 (January 2002): esp. 123–25.
9 On the distinction between legitimacy and legitimation, see Rodney Barker, Legitimating Identities:
The Self-Presentations of Rulers and Subjects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–29.
10 Hans J. Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American
Foreign Policy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 3–13; Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The
Struggle for Power and Peace, brief ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 1993 [1948]), 4–12. Among structural
realists, see Colin Elman, “Horses for Courses: Why Not Neorealist Theories of Foreign Policy?” Security
Studies 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1996): 7–53; John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 29–54. For this view of neoclassical realism, see Brian C. Rathbun, “A Rose
by Any Other Name: Neoclassical Realism as the Logical and Necessary Extension of Structural Realism,”
Security Studies 17, no. 2 (April 2008): 294–321.
understand the national interest to be nothing more than the aggregation of

individual interests, it is for them an analytically empty concept.11 In con-
trast, we see the national interest as quite real, politically consequential, and
constructed.12 The rhetoric of “the national interest” is an enduring feature of
the politics of national security. As a result, even when private interests com-
mandeer national policy, only a grand strategy that successfully lays claim
to serving the national interest can be legitimate. Aims that are not brought
under the mantle of the national interest lack legitimacy because they are
thought to serve interests that are either too cosmopolitan (that is, the in-
terests of the global community) or too parochial (that is, the interests of
domestic groups). Legitimation is essential to the production of the national
interest in two ways. First, effective legitimation overcomes communal and
ideological cleavages and brings into being the coherent collective that is to
be secured.13 Second, effective legitimation represents strategy as transcend-
ing both the trivialities of everyday politics and the claims of narrow groups
and as serving the nation’s long-term welfare. Those who fail to legitimate
their private agendas are seen as seeking to hijack the state to their ends.
2. Identifying threats. Over twenty-five years ago, Stephen M. Walt per-
suasively argued that states did not balance power but threat, which he
theorized as a product of material resources, geographic proximity, and of-
fensive intentions.14 Ever since, scholars have struggled to understand when
states view others as having aggressive or benign purposes. Because revi-
sionist states can gain strategic advantage from pretending to be satisfied,
leaders often do not trust other states’ assurances. Some have argued that
the possibility of predation means that leaders have no choice but to aim for
regional and, in theory, global domination.15 But others maintain that leaders
look to various sources for meaningful information as to others’ intentions.
Constructivists highlight shared identity, ideology, and symbols. Rationalists
point to costly signals, usually deeds and sometimes public verbal com-
mitments. Complementing these accounts of how states make inferences
about intentions in global politics, we emphasize the legitimating rhetoric
employed by leaders. States’ intentions are deemed benign if their leaders
11 On liberalism, see Andrew Moravcsik, “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of Inter-
national Politics,” International Organization 51, no. 4 (Autumn 1997): 513–53. In the security domain,
liberal approaches typically examine the (economic) sources of individual and interest group preferences
and the institutions that aggregate them; see Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and
Change in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Benjamin O. Fordham,
Building the Cold War Consensus: The Political Economy of U.S. National Security, 1949–51 (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1998); Kevin Narizny, The Political Economy of Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2007).
12 See, relatedly, Weldes, Constructing National Interests.
13 Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
34.
14 Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).
15 Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
plausibly invoke legitimate international norms to explain behavior, such as

arms acquisition or territorial expansion, that might otherwise be thought
troubling. Conversely, states’ intentions are deemed aggressive if their lead-
ers fail to make legitimate sense of similar, and even more modest, actions.
Moreover, this should be the case even when those pronouncements do
not generate substantial domestic audience costs.16 Legitimate or illegitimate
rhetorical formulations are, to adopt the language of Robert Jervis, an “index”
and thus meaningful.17
3. Selecting remedies. Having defined interests and threats, states must
select the strategy most likely to achieve their desired ends, given available
means. Realists and rationalists would argue that states do, and should, opt
for the most efficient strategy—that is, the one that comes closest to achiev-
ing the nation’s goals at lowest cost. The logic of legitimation suggests, how-
ever, that some strategic options are taken off the table because they employ
methods that are not publicly sustainable, even though they are relatively
effective and inexpensive. This does not render choice meaningless. Rather,
in our view, the boundaries of the legitimate constitute the range of viable
strategies from which actors may then strategically select. Thus leaders are
often reluctant to pursue otherwise plausible strategies that they perceive to
be incapable of public legitimation—even when they strongly prefer them
on substantive grounds or even when there is clear evidence that the current
strategic approach is not working. If they do give voice to such strategies,
they are either ignored in public debate or condemned as illegitimate and
treated as beyond the pale. A debate conducted without concern for legiti-
macy would consider the full range of alternatives and would frame rejected
strategies as unwise or excessively costly.
4. Mobilizing publics and resources. Finally, by mobilizing publics at
home and abroad, legitimation shapes the execution of grand strategy: it is
crucial to bringing domestic allies on board and to creating, sustaining, and
eroding international coalitions. Existing realist and rationalist theories of
grand strategy have recognized how leaders use public rhetoric to stoke the
energies of the masses—to bamboozle them into supporting strategic aims at
odds with their own interests rightly understood or to generate a bargaining
advantage via the logic of audience costs.18 But they have treated public au-
diences as easily manipulated, as always receptive to some cleverly worded
16 If one were to include the costs imposed by foreign audiences, the argument would become
a tautology. We would then know a signal was costly because other states responded as if it were
meaningful and imposed costs in response. The logic of domestic audience costs avoids tautology by
separating who is imposing the cost (domestic audiences) from who is interpreting the signal (foreign
audiences).
17 Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations, Morningside ed. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989 [1970]).

18 For a classical realist view, see George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1951). Among contemporary realists, see, among others, Jack L. Snyder,
Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
appeal that advances the speaker’s interests. Similarly, scholars more often
theorize the formation, endurance, and collapse of international alignments
as the product of interests or at most institutional inertia, rather than the
statesman’s management of alliance relations.19 A legitimation perspective
recognizes that legitimacy is not always readily granted and thus that it is
both an enabler of and a constraint upon the mobilization of domestic and
international audiences. Whether domestic publics support grand strategy
and devote resources to it, and whether foreign leaders and publics see their
interests as sufficiently overlapping to warrant collective action, are contin-
gent on how policy is justified, independent of the material and geopolitical
circumstances.
In sum, if we are right, then the course of grand strategy depends in
part on the perception of its legitimacy. If we are right, how political actors
articulate collective goals, the array of threats, and the conceivable means
has effects on the support of relevant audiences, the formation of coalitions,
the marginalization of opponents, the resilience of national mobilization,
and the selection of policy instruments. If we are right, some efforts to justify
grand strategy fail because of how they are legitimated, with significant
consequences—yielding the impression of parochial interests, the allegation
of threat inflation, and a vigorous opposition. If we are right, strategies of
legitimation have discernible effects on grand strategy’s elements above and
beyond the unquestionably important factors that rightly feature prominently
in the traditional literature—relative power and offensive intent, the efficacy
of given means, the international normative fabric, domestic culture and
ideas, and domestic institutions and coalition formation.20
1991); Chaim Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of
the Iraq War,” International Security 29, no. 1 (Summer 2004): 5–48; John J. Mearsheimer, Why Leaders
Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For
Snyder, for instance, leaders’ rhetoric is powerful: their myths of empire mobilize publics, and then,
via “blowback,” those mobilized publics compel leaders to pursue imperialist dreams beyond the point
of rational expansion. But myths of empire, in Snyder’s account, always seem to be legitimate and to
resonate, and thus the real causal work is done by the structure of domestic interests that makes such
rhetorical motifs appealing.
19 For typical approaches, see Stephen M. Walt, “Why Alliances Endure or Collapse,” Survival 39,
no. 1 (Spring 1997): 156–79; Robert B. McCalla, “NATO’s Persistence after the Cold War,” International
Organization 50, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 445–75. Important exceptions, which focus on the management
of alliance relations, include Glenn Snyder, Alliance Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997);
Timothy W. Crawford, “Preventing Enemy Coalitions: How Wedge Strategies Shape Power Politics,”
International Security 35, no. 4 (Spring 2011): 155–89; Jeremy Pressman, Warring Friends: Alliance
Restraint in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
20 The traditional literature on the factors shaping grand strategy is immense. On the international
strategic context, see Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics; Charles L. Glaser, Rational Theory
of International Politics: The Logic of Competition and Cooperation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2010). On international norms, see Finnemore, Purpose of Intervention; Tannenwald, Nuclear
Taboo. On state structure, see Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s
World Role (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). On domestic political interests, see Patrick J.
McDonald, The Invisible Hand of Peace: Capitalism, The War Machine, and International Relations Theory
The Roots of Legitimation

Legitimation is typically an imperative, not a mere nicety, of foreign policy
and global politics.21 There are of course brute facts in the world. “The rise
of China” is a prevalent trope in elite and popular discourse, but it does
not exist solely in the linguistic realm: it encapsulates that nation’s rapid
economic growth, urbanization, and military modernization.22 But processes
of legitimation impart meaning to those material developments and thus
shape how other nations respond. If China’s rise spoke for itself, as both
defenders and critics of US foreign policy often imply, there would not be a
vigorous debate over the implications of its rise for international and regional
order. Because the meaning of global events and material structures is not
self-evident—they “do not come with an instruction sheet,” as Mark Blyth
has put it—they cannot be treated as objective inputs into strategy.23 This is
where legitimation comes in.
The centrality of legitimation derives from two premises regarding hu-
man nature: that human beings are both meaning-making and deeply social
animals. A long line of research in the social sciences and humanities affirms
that humans are compelled, perhaps even by nature, to imbue their own
actions and those of others with meaning. That is why the human mind
readily imposes an interpretive framework on disparate pieces of data, see-
ing order even when there is none.24 And that is why human beings are
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest. On domestic
culture and ideas, see Thomas U. Berger, Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany
and Japan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); John S. Duffield, World Power Forsaken:
Political Culture, International Institutions, and German Security Policy After Unification (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1998); Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy
from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Jeffrey W. Legro, Rethinking the
World: Great Power Strategies and International Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). On
domestic politics, see Snyder, Myths of Empire; Thomas J. Christensen, Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy,
Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947–1958 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1996); Fordham, Building the Cold War Consensus; Randall L. Schweller, Unanswered Threats:
Political Constraints on the Balance of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). On
regime type, see the huge literatures on the democratic peace and audience costs.
21 Generally, on the imperative to legitimation, see Jon Elster, “Strategic Uses of Argument,” in
Barriers to Conflict Resolution, ed. Kenneth Arrow et al. (New York: Norton, 1995), 244–52; Mark C.
Suchman, “Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches,” Academy of Management Review
20, no. 3 (July 1995): 571–610.
22 Though those too are bulky concepts, resting on layers of sedimented meanings. However, they
are shorthands for very concrete processes: goods being manufactured and sold, people moving from
villages to cities, capital-intensive weaponry being acquired.
23 Mark Blyth, “Structures Do Not Come with an Instruction Sheet: Interests, Ideas, and Progress in
Political Science,” Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 4 (December 2003): 695–706.

24 On the human penchant for imposing cognitive order, see Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What
Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (New York: Free Press, 1991), esp. 9–28; Arie W.
Kruglanski, The Psychology of Closed Mindedness (New York: Psychology Press, 2004); Leonid Perlovsky,
“Language and Cognition,” Neural Networks 22, no. 3 (April 2009): 247–57; Richard M. Sorrentino and
Christopher J. R. Roney, The Uncertain Mind: Individual Differences in Facing the Unknown (Philadelphia:
Psychology Press, 2000).
driven not only to describe what they have done but to explain why they
have done it. Philosophers debate whether reasons are properly understood
as causes for action, but providing reasons for our own actions and making
sense of others’ actions is central to our existence.25 A more social impera-
tive complements this internal one. Living in communities and craving their
fellows’ approval, human beings are governed by what Jon Elster has termed
“the civilizing force of hypocrisy”: when we speak in public, we must offer
socially acceptable reasons or face the censure of our peers.26
There are few social settings in which legitimation does not feature
prominently. Although exasperated parents may eventually command their
children to “do as I say!”, at even a fairly young age children resist parental
orders they think morally wrong or otherwise illegitimate.27 In hierarchical
societies, the dominated—whether on the basis of class, ethnicity, caste, reli-
gion, or gender—refuse to grant legitimacy to their subordination.28 Superiors
in a bureaucracy do at times issue orders without explaining themselves, but
they too typically justify their decisions to secure their underlings’ buy-in.
Certainly the powerful, more often than the weak, can say patently absurd or
contradictory things and still get their way. But, in most social circumstances,
even the powerful must explain themselves in terms that others comprehend
and find acceptable. Those who do not care to legitimate their claims are
rejected or ignored. At the extreme such an individual “is quickly regarded
as a fanatic, the prey of interior demons, rather than as a reasonable person
seeking to share his convictions.”29
Public battles over the national interest, the threat environment, and
the need for public sacrifice are often intense. Because the stakes in these
legitimation contests are high, for both moral principles and material inter-
ests, few are willing to engage in open-ended deliberation that may well
result in outcomes they did not initially favor.30 Rather they deploy whatever
25 The seminal philosophical work is Donald Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” Journal
of Philosophy 60, no. 23 (November 1963): 685–700. On the centrality of reason-giving in practice, see
Charles Tilly, Why? What Happens When People Give Reasons . . . and Why (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2008).
26 Jon Elster, “Deliberation and Constitution-Making,” in Deliberative Democracy, ed. Jon Elster
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 104.

27 Serena A. Perkins and Elliot Turiel, “To Lie or Not to Lie: To Whom and Under What Circum-
stances,” Child Development 78, no. 2 (March–April 2007): 609–21; Turiel, The Culture of Morality: Social
Development, Context, and Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 107–18; Turiel,
“Moral Development,” in Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, Volume 1: Theory &
Method, ed. William F. Overton and Peter C. Molenaar (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2014).
28 See James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1985); for a psychological perspective, see Turiel, The Culture of Morality, esp.
67–93.
29 Chaı̈m Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982),
16.
30 While the emphasis here is on the agentic side of the equation, we acknowledge that political
agents are discursively produced: structures of discourse constitute the identities that individuals bring
resources they can for strategic advantage, and that includes rhetorical ma-
neuver.31 That competition cannot be divorced from the material—having a
megaphone undoubtedly matters if one wishes to be heard—but it also nec-
essarily takes place in the realm of language, spoken and symbolic. While
rationalists and realists might argue that appeals resonate based only on
how they accord with audiences’ already formed interests, in reality people
commonly recognize as legitimate some stances that they do not favor, sug-
gesting that the attribution of legitimacy is at least somewhat distinct from
the politics of interest.32
Our model of legitimation rests on four analytical wagers: that actors are
both strategic and social; that legitimation works by imparting meaning to
political action; that legitimation is laced through with contestation; and that
the power of language emerges through contentious dialogue. We term this
model “pragmatic” because it centers analysis on specific rhetorical deploy-
ments in particular political and social contexts.33 In combination, these four
wagers distinguish our pragmatic model from other approaches to language
common in the study of politics and international relations.
First, while our model treats political actors as strategic, it does not
reduce legitimation to self-interest. Actors are embedded in a social envi-
ronment that simultaneously makes possible and confines strategic action.
Even scheming elites cannot stand outside structures of discourse. They too
operate with a given “cultural tool-kit,” in Ann Swidler’s words, that includes
rhetorical resources.34 To conceive of speakers and audiences as social crea-
tures is not to imagine them as cultural dopes, mindlessly following culture’s
purported dictates. Rather, as they seek to make sense of their world, and as
they respond to others’ meaning-making efforts, they are equally subject to,
and empowered by, the shared resources embedded in their culture. This
stands in contrast to the many realists who see public rhetoric as a mere fig
into the political arena and indeed their conception of the legitimate. On productive power, see Michael
N. Barnett and Raymond Duvall, “Power in International Politics,” International Organization 59, no. 1
(Winter 2005): 39–76.
31 See, for instance, Frank Schimmelfenig, “The Community Trap: Liberal Norms, Rhetorical Action,
and the Eastern Enlargement of the European Union,” International Organization 55, no. 1 (Winter 2001):
47–80; Schimmelfenig, The EU, NATO, and the Integration of Europe: Rules and Rhetoric (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).
32 Our view stands in contrast to that associating effective legitimation with mass support for policy
and thus with policy consensus: see, for instance, Alexander L. George, “Domestic Constraints on Regime
Change in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Need for Policy Legitimacy,” in Change in the International System,
ed. Ole R. Holsti et al. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981), 233–62.
33 See similarly Marie-Laure Ryan, “Toward a Definition of Narrative,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Narrative, ed. David Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 25; Tine Hanrieder,
“The False Promise of the Better Argument,” International Theory 3, no. 3 (November 2011): 409–10.
On pragmatism and international relations, see Gunther Hellmann, ed., “The Forum: Pragmatism and
International Relations,” International Studies Review 11, no. 3 (September 2009): 638–62; Jörg Friedrichs
and Friedrich Kratochwil, “On Acting and Knowing: How Pragmatism Can Advance International Relations
Research and Methodology,” International Organization 63, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 701–31.
34 Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action,” American Sociological Review 51, no. 2 (April 1986): 273–86.
leaf covering the naked pursuit of interest and who assume that elites easily
bend the masses to their ends. It is not the case then that where there is a
will, there must always be a rhetorical way.
Second, legitimation exerts effects on politics by imparting meaning to
action. Rationalist approaches to public rhetoric, in contrast, flatten language
to a medium for the communication of information that, when costly, reveals
such information to be credible. However, rationalists thereby overlook the
care with which speakers construct public arguments, audiences’ attention
to rhetorical contest, and the ensuing intense debates over the interpretation
of legitimation, over what a given speaker means and what it portends. Our
pragmatic model emphasizes that whether public claims-making is legitimate
renders a signal meaningful, even if it does not entail material costs. It has a
constitutive effect on grand strategy by shaping public expectations, defining
the issues at stake, distinguishing signals from noise, and laying the basis
for policy debate.35 Threats are constructed, not merely revealed, in the
course of legitimation. The rationalist bargaining model has seized upon one
aspect of the dynamics of public rhetoric, while overlooking its much more
fundamental role in the making of meaning in global politics.
Third, we conceive of political actors as less socialized and more strate-
gic than in many constructivist accounts. Constructivists informed by the dis-
course ethics of Jürgen Habermas have viewed persuasive rhetoric as central
to normative change in international relations, and they have argued that per-
suasion is most likely when speakers and listeners are both committed to the
open exchange of ideas.36 While Habermas recognizes that politics is often
a site of strategic action, he envisions and directs humanity toward a politics
in which power and rank are left at the door, in which agonistic competition
is replaced by deliberation and ultimately consensus. Our pragmatic model,
in contrast, theorizes language use as necessarily deeply shot through with
power and marked by contest. Moreover, we do not presuppose universal
standards by which audiences judge arguments persuasive. In Habermas’s
account, actors can be moved by the “unforced force of the better argument,”
35 To say something is constitutive simply means to explain what makes a particular social world
possible. As Richard Ned Lebow puts it, we call something “constitutive” when it affects “who becomes
actors, how they are recognised as such, and how they must behave to sustain their identities and
status.” See Lebow, “Constitutive Causality: Imagined Spaces and Political Practices,” Millennium 38, no.
2 (December 2009): 2. On constitutive effects, see also Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International
Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 171–78.
36 Risse, “‘Let’s Argue!”’; Harald Müller, “International Relations as Communicative Action,” in Con-
structing International Relations: The Next Generation, ed. Karin M. Fierke and Knud Erik Jorgensen
(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001); Marc Lynch, “Why Engage? China and the Logic of Communicative
Engagement,” European Journal of International Relations 8, no. 2 (June 2002): 187–230. On the central-
ity of persuasion to much constructivist international relations scholarship, see Crawford, Argument and
Change; Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1996), 141; Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,”
International Organization 52, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 914; Rodger A. Payne, “Persuasion, Frames and Norm
Construction,” European Journal of International Relations 7, no. 1 (March 2001): 37–61.
but this presumes that they are already in agreement on fundamentals, that
they have already attained substantial zones of consensus.37 We, however,
see legitimation as taking place before particular, not universal, audiences,
and claimants adapt to the audience’s “distinctive and particular passions
and their particular commitments, sentiments, and beliefs.”38
Finally, a pragmatic model of legitimation rests on a dialogical view
of politics, in which various articulations compete for dominance. An ear-
lier post-positivist linguistic turn in international relations deconstructed au-
thoritative texts to unearth the unarticulated “common sense” assumptions
that inform and structure policy.39 Following Michel Foucault, these scholars
pointed out how discursive formations define the key categories of social
and political life and thus constitute the range of legitimate politics. We con-
cur with their foundational insight that discourse is both the product, and
productive, of power. But we take issue with their implicit assertion, in Iver
Neumann’s formulation, that “there is nothing outside of discourse and, for
this reason, the analysis of language is all that we need in order to account
for what is going on in the world.”40 Rather, legitimation proves powerful
through a complex interplay between text and context, between what is
said and where and when it is said. Existing discursive formations do not
eliminate all space for choice and contingency, and thus agency.
Scholars of international relations routinely treat legitimation as a mask
for power and interests, cast legitimation as an idealized alternative to power,
reduce public rhetoric’s effects to the revelation of information, or see public
rhetoric as an exercise in manipulation. To place one’s analytical bets on le-
gitimation as pragmatic performance is not to deny that rhetorical exchange
takes place in the shadow of material power, reflects elite strategizing, or
involves the communication of information. It is, however, to insist that legit-
imation is a form of power, that strategizing elites cannot escape the bonds
of legitimacy, that rhetorical exchange goes beyond signaling resolve and
reservation values, and that the outcome of rhetorical contestation cannot be
boiled down to the distribution of material power alone.
37 Hanrieder, “The False Promise of the Better Argument.”

38 Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006), 5. See also Clark, Legitimacy in International Society, 254.
39 See, among many others, Michael J. Shapiro, Language and Political Understanding: The Politics
of Discursive Practices (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981); James Der Derian and Michael J.
Shapiro, eds., International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, MA:
Lexington Books, 1989); David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics
of Identity, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial
Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996).
40 Iver B. Neumann, “Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn: The Case of Diplomacy,” Millennium:
Journal of International Studies 31, no. 3 (July 2002): 629.

THE LEGITIMATION OF GRAND STRATEGY:

WHY AND WHEN IT MATTERS
Legitimation is so commonplace that we might be tempted to conclude that it

is of little consequence in accounting for variation in political processes and
outcomes. The analytical challenge is to ascertain when it matters to grand
strategy and its four constituent components. We contend that legitimation is
necessary whenever publics (however broad or narrow) must be mobilized,
and it lurks in the background wherever there is a reasonable chance that the
glare of attention will turn. Put differently, the political impact of legitimation
lies at the intersection of two demands: the public’s demand for legitimation,
or the visibility of a policy domain, and the government’s demand for the
public’s contribution, or the need for mobilization.
Audiences’ insistence that officials explain themselves is a key driver
of legitimation. If relevant publics are inattentive, if they are unlikely to be
made to pay attention, and if the policy in question can be hidden from
public view, legitimation is not necessary. Much escapes public scrutiny
in large bureaucratic nation-states—thanks to the public’s and the media’s
wavering attention, the technical sophistication of policy, legislatures’ incli-
nation to delegate, the broad scope of state activity, and the sheer size of
the bureaucracy. Yet even policies that government officials go to lengths
to keep secret must often be capable of legitimation, as the recent scandals
over National Security Agency spying in the United States have reminded
us. Politicians prefer covert means when they cannot offer a rationale that
audiences would deem legitimate, but covert actions often eventually come
to light and then require justification after the fact. The public demand for
legitimation is thus a function in large part of policy visibility.
However, government officials do not have incentives to keep invisible
as much of the policy space as possible. Governments often need to mobi-
lize the public, for both tangible resources and symbolic support, and they
would rather people willingly contribute the needed resources. That requires
engaging relevant publics, not shutting them out of the policymaking pro-
cess, and thus legitimation, not coercion. The more extensive and regular the
government’s needs, the more institutionalized legitimation becomes. Thus
the roots of representative parliamentary institutions and the machinery of
liberal politics lie, Charles Tilly argues, in European states’ need to mobi-
lize resources for war-making.41 The greater the government’s demand for
resources, the greater its need to engage in legitimation.
41 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992);
Tilly, “The Emergence of Citizenship in France and Elsewhere,” International Review of Social History
40, supplement 3 (December 1995): 223–36. See also Stephen Holmes, “Lineages of the Rule of Law,” in
Democracy and the Rule of Law, ed. José Marı́a Maravall and Adam Przeworski (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 19–61.
FIGURE 1 When legitimation matters.
In Figure 1, we combine these two dimensions to generate claims about

when legitimation matters. Legitimation is obviously crucial in the upper-
right cell: when policies are highly visible and when the government must
mobilize public support. We should then observe substantial government-led
efforts to legitimate its preferred policy, and the success of those efforts will
have real consequences—or else the government would not have expended
resources on legitimation in the first place. But the government’s success is
not assured. When policy is highly visible, it is then also more likely that
political forces are arrayed in opposition and that alternative legitimations
are present in the public sphere. The stakes of that legitimation contest are
substantial: as Paul Kennedy has pointed out, how adeptly states mobilize
the home front is often crucial to grand strategy.42 The dynamics of the
upper-right cell are, for instance, typical of the years of rivalry and crisis that
precede major interstate war and, not surprisingly, several of the articles in
this special issue focus in on specifically these periods of interstate conflict
to demonstrate how legitimation matters.
In contrast, legitimation matters little in the lower-left cell: when poli-
cies are relatively invisible and when government has little incentive to mo-
bilize public resources. With audiences inattentive or unaware, and with
government not requiring overt expressions or manifestations of legitimacy,
government-led efforts to legitimate policy are expected to be minimal. In
relatively open polities, challenges are inevitable, but, under circumstances
of low visibility and mobilization, these are fewer in number and lower
in intensity, they hail from the margins, and officials, feeling little pressure
to take critics seriously, respond in relatively perfunctory fashion. Think,
for instance, of the spare efforts among US officials to legitimate the es-
tablishment and maintenance of hundreds of military installations around
the world; US ambassadors exert far more energy defending these bases to
host audiences than their domestic counterparts must at home. Or consider
42 Kennedy, “Grand Strategy in War and Peace,” 4–6.

covert operations, from the arming of rebels to the assassination of foreign

leaders, for which public legitimation is irrelevant, at least temporarily. How-
ever, this zone, we argue, is fairly small because government must always
account for the possibility that outside actors—from domestic and transna-
tional nongovernmental organizations to opposition politicians—will work to
increase an issue’s visibility and thus that newly attentive publics will demand
legitimation in retrospect.
Many policy issues, however, fall into the other two cells of Figure 1.
In the lower-right cell, the public is not focused on a given issue, yet the
government requires major public contributions for policy to succeed. The
purpose of legitimation under these conditions is to set the public agenda,
to get people to pay attention. Consider, for instance, the strategic efforts
of governments, and sometimes groups in civil society, to raise the profile
of particular threats. This is as true of routine threat construction as it is
of so-called threat inflation. There are numerous ways to render a policy
domain publicly visible, but it is hard to imagine doing so without a sus-
tained campaign of legitimation—as Dean Acheson understood early in the
Cold War, when he helped craft Harry Truman’s case for aid to Greece and
Turkey.43 While there is abundant evidence that, at least in the United States,
presidents cannot run roughshod over their opponents and dictate pub-
lic opinion, intensive government and specifically presidential leadership to
shape the national agenda is often more effective.44 The strategy and style
of legitimation during this agenda-setting phase set boundary constraints for
subsequent legitimation, once the issue has already seized the public’s at-
tention. Whether there are any powerful rhetorical “consistency constraints”
43 Secretary of State George Marshall had reportedly presented his brief for aid in “dry and economical
terms” to the congressional leadership, with disappointing results. His undersecretary, Dean Acheson, then
intervened, placing the situation in a broader narrative and employing memorable metaphors. Senator
Arthur Vandenberg reportedly offered his support, if the president would make the case in public as
Acheson had in private. See Joseph M. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (New York: Viking Press, 1955), 139–44.
Whether this is really what happened is debatable; see Denise M. Bostdorff, Proclaiming the Truman
Doctrine: The Cold War Call to Arms (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 69–71.
44 Skeptical of the power of presidential speech to mold opinion are, among a large literature, George
C. Edwards III, On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003);
Edwards, The Strategic President: Persuasion and Opportunity in Presidential Leadership (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2009). See similarly Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, Politicians
Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000); B. Dan Wood, The Myth of Presidential Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 120–56. However, on presidential agenda-setting, see especially Jeffrey E. Cohen,
Presidential Responsiveness and Public Policy-making: The Public and the Policies That Presidents Choose
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Roderick P. Hart, “Thinking Harder About Presidential
Discourse,” in The Prospect of Presidential Rhetoric, ed. James Arnt Aune and Martin J. Medhurst (Col-
lege Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 244–46; Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha and Jeffrey S. Peake,
Breaking Through the Noise: Presidential Leadership, Public Opinion, and the News Media (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2011). For a review, see B. Dan Wood, “Presidents and the Political Agenda,”
in The Oxford Handbook of the American Presidency, ed. George C. Edwards III and William G. Howell
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 108–32.
at work in the political arena is much debated, and indeed the empirical
jury is still out, but they would seem most likely to operate in the wake of
a concerted campaign to shape the national conversation.45 This cell then is
usually not a stable equilibrium. As an issue’s visibility rises, politics migrates
toward the upper-right cell.
In the upper-left cell—when the visibility of an issue is high, yet the gov-
ernment’s demand for public contribution is low—the degree of observed
legitimation is contingent. Not needing much public mobilization, the gov-
ernment has no incentive to engage in regular legitimation. Many episodes
of coercive diplomacy fall into this category. So too has the US drone strike
campaign of recent years in such places as Pakistan and Yemen. But often
policy opponents will choose to make this a site of challenge, whether out
of principle or because they see potential for political profit—as has been
the case with respect to drone warfare. Moreover, under the watchful eye
of civil society, officials must be ready to justify policy and thus have strong
incentives to avoid flagrantly illegitimate behavior. Policies in this zone may
then not be the subject of active official legitimation, but they must always
be capable of legitimation.
To this point, we have treated the model’s two dimensions of visibility
and the need for mobilization largely as untheorized, exogenous inputs.
Understanding when legitimation shapes political processes and outcomes
requires fleshing out when policies are likely to become visible and when
publics must be mobilized. From the two dimensions’ intersection, we derive
five hypotheses that inform this special issue. Along the way we begin to
introduce the special issue’s articles by drawing on their findings to illustrate
and flesh out our theoretical claims.
First, the broader the scope of policy, the more important legitimation
is for its success. Officials can, and often seek to, keep fine-grained matters
out of the public eye, but that is not possible when it comes to policies of
broad scope, which are intrinsically visible because they impact so many
constituencies and often require substantial mobilization. With respect to
such policies, leaders have no choice but to defend their broad outlines
and to explain how select initiatives fit into that outline. Officials are thus
more likely to have to legitimate grand strategy than more mundane areas of
policy, domestic or foreign. Leaders who fail to articulate a coherent grand
strategy are often attacked for their failure to do so—as President Barack
Obama discovered.46 While grand strategy is, from a realist perspective, a
45 On rhetorical consistency constraints, see, for instance, the ongoing debate on audience costs.
See also Martha Finnemore, “Legitimacy, Hypocrisy, and the Social Structure of Unipolarity: Why Being
a Unipole Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be,” World Politics 61, no. 1 (January 2009): 58–85; Kelly M.
Greenhill, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2010), 4–5.
46 Niall Ferguson, “Obama’s Egypt and Foreign-Policy Failures,” Newsweek, 13 February 2011; Jackson
Diehl, “Obama’s Foreign Policy Needs an Update,” Washington Post, 22 November 2010. In defense of
“hard” case for legitimation given the high stakes of national security, it is,
from a legitimation perspective, a “most likely” case—as a broad, integrative
statement about how the nation pursues its ends abroad. As the next four
hypotheses make clear, however, even in the realm of grand strategy, there
is wide variation in how much legitimation matters.
Second, the more private interests stand to gain or lose from the adop-
tion of a particular strategy, the more legitimation determines its success, par-
ticularly in producing the national interest. To realists, this will seem a para-
doxical statement. They generally see political competition and logrolling
among private interests in national security affairs as sounding the death-
knell of rational strategy, leading at best to policy incoherence and at worst
to the hijacking of the state for parochial aims.47 To liberals, such a statement
is even more problematic, because they deny that there is anything beyond
the regular competition among interest groups to control the levers of state.
Yet “the national interest” exists even when grand strategy advances some
interests and harms others. Only when private interests succeed in represent-
ing their interests as those of the collective—from the weltpolitik of imperial
Germany’s “coalition of iron and rye” to the counterproliferatı́on agenda of
the George W. Bush administration’s neoconservatives—do they close the
gap between their ambitions and their resources.
Producing a national interest is more challenging, and legitimation is
correspondingly more important, when the private interests at stake are more
obviously great and when the range of implicated interests is broader. The
more clearly interests are at stake in foreign policy, and the more substantial
those interests are, the more visible policy is—to the parties who stand to
gain or lose and to others. Those who see their prospects as tied to the global
economy will be more attentive to foreign affairs than those whose fortunes
lie closer to home. The more aware others are that private interests are likely
to seek to turn the machinery of government to their own ends, the greater
the scrutiny to which they subject policy proposals. The more divided the
contending interests, the greater the need to mobilize the public, and the
more hinges on a resonant rhetoric that can mobilize a winning coalition. It
was precisely the proliferation and diversity of private interests in modern
democracies, Vibeke Schou Tjalve and Michael C. Williams show in their
article in this special issue, that worried postwar realists so much. They
perceived that, to compete with fascist and communist polities, democracies
would require robust rhetorical leadership to articulate collective purpose,
unify the public, and make grand strategy possible.
Obama’s implicit grand strategy, see Daniel W. Drezner, “Does Obama Have a Grand Strategy?” Foreign
Affairs 90, no. 4 (January/February 2011): 57–68. For a contrary view, in praise of foreign policy in the
absence of grand strategy, see David M. Edelstein, “Why Grand Strategy Isn’t So Grand: The Case for
Strategic Pragmatism” (unpublished manuscript, Georgetown University, 2014).
47 See, notably, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
(New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2007).

Third, the greater the threat, the more legitimation shapes grand strat-
egy. Threats are constructed, but not all constructions are equally plausible:
historical memory, perceived urgency, and, yes, the objective capacity for
destruction can make threats appear more or less intense. As the percep-
tion of threat rises, national security policy becomes more visible to broader
swaths of the public, and the more necessary domestic mobilization becomes
to counter the threat. Structural realists would agree, but they nevertheless
conclude that vigorous debate over strategy is a luxury of a slack interna-
tional environment, which implies that legitimation should matter less as
external threats grow more intense. They would be right if societies easily
came together in the face of threat, but Randall Schweller has convincingly
shown that social cleavages do not simply evaporate.48 However, in our
view, and contra Schweller, neither are such cleavages necessarily fixed.
Whether they are overcome or whether they endure depends on strategies
of legitimation. That Germany in the 1930s posed a threat was obvious to
the British government and public alike. But, Stacie E. Goddard argues in
her contribution to the special issue, by framing Germany’s expansion in
terms of prevailing norms of self-determination, Adolf Hitler undercut those
Britons who argued in favor of massive rearmament. Similarly, prior to June
1940, those who opposed intervention in Europe’s strife remained dominant
in the United States. The fall of France created space to legitimate an inter-
ventionist alternative, Ronald R. Krebs maintains in his article, but Franklin
Delano Roosevelt’s flawed rhetorical strategy failed to shunt aside the vul-
nerable non-interventionists and left the president’s more hawkish advisers
frustrated.
Fourth, legitimation can matter just as much, and sometimes much more,
to grand strategy in autocracies as in democracies. Conventional scholarly
wisdom holds that, if legitimation matters at all for grand strategy, it should
matter in democracies—where the formulation and operation of grand strat-
egy are visible to the general public, where strategic success hinges on
public support, and where leaders are relatively accountable and have less
access to force as a mode of public control.49 In essence, many scholars
assume that, with respect to grand strategy, democracies always operate in
the top-right cell of Figure 1: where policy is visible, and where large-scale
mobilization is necessary. However, we agree with recent critics who believe
these assumptions are suspect. Citizens in democracies might in principle
have greater access to information, but they often are not interested in or
informed about foreign policy. As a result, they do not pay much attention
48 Schweller, Unanswered Threats.

49 These sorts of idealized views of democracy are common in the rationalist literature on the
democratic peace. For a summary, see Charles Lipson, Reliable Partners: How Democracies Have Made a
Separate Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
to foreign affairs, rendering policy effectively invisible. When their contribu-

tion is required, they happily follow the cues of trusted elites.50 Were this
the whole story, legitimation would routinely be inconsequential for foreign
policy in democracies.
Yet legitimation remains relevant wherever our two conditions—
visibility and need for mobilization—hold. Legitimation of grand strategy
plays little role in totalitarian or concentrated authoritarian regimes because
governments can extract the needed resources via repression and can secure
the support of a small circle of elites through the distribution of rents. In
other regime types, which require mobilizing the support of more of the
population, repression and cooptation are too expensive. Yet legitimation of
grand strategy is also not necessary in ideal-type mass democracies, we have
already argued, because mass publics do not demand legitimation in this
policy arena. Legitimation is, however, a more regular feature of the politics
of grand strategy in both anocratic regimes and representative democracies.
These regimes tend to be governed by a medium-sized “selectorate”—that
portion of the population that selects candidates for public office and to
whom officials are actually accountable—that is large enough to take coop-
tation and repression off the table and small enough that its members are
likely to be attentive and informed.51
The ironic upshot is that the more democracies approach their idealized
image and entail mass participation, the less the impact of legitimation. Thus,
Jack Snyder argues, in his article in this special issue, that the way in which
Woodrow Wilson legitimated America’s involvement in the Great War was
crucial to the fate of intervention. This was not because the United States
was a mass democracy in the early twentieth century but rather because
its political structure limited decision making to a political class that was
too large to be bought off, that was small enough to bother being well-
informed, and that was deeply divided by cleavages that cut across the
usual progressive-conservative lines. In these circumstances, public rhetorical
strategy could make a real difference, and—according to Snyder—it did.
Fifth, legitimation matters more to grand strategy when international
security institutions are weak. Realists rightly argue that legitimation would
have little effect in a pure anarchy, where governance and shared norms
were non-existent. For legitimation to matter, there must be “rules of the
50 This view of public opinion is well established. See Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, The
Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992); John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992); Adam J. Berinsky, In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War
II to Iraq (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). For elaboration of the implications for international
relations, see Elizabeth N. Saunders, “War and the Inner Circle: Democratic Elites and the Politics of
Using Force,” Security Studies (forthcoming); Saunders, “Good Democratic Leadership in Foreign Affairs:
An Elite-Centered Approach,” in Good Democratic Leadership: On Prudence and Judgment in Modern
Democracies, ed. John Kane and Haig Patapan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 158–177.
51 On selectorate theory, see Bruce Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

game”: in their absence, there is, quite simply, nothing to violate. Yet the
anarchy of Kenneth N. Waltz’s Theory of International Politics is, as he him-
self suggested, but an analytic ideal.52 In reality, norms and rules suffuse
interstate relations. Liberals and constructivists typically argue that highly
institutionalized environments are ideal settings for legitimation: by disci-
plining debate, taming material power, and providing an opening for true
persuasion, they come closest to the ideal conditions for deliberation.
However, the logic of legitimation yields the contrary conclusion: that
deep institutionalization makes mobilization, and thus legitimation, unneces-
sary. Counterintuitively, when norms become deeply institutionalized—with
regular procedures for implementing shared understandings—governments
have little need to mobilize relevant audiences and thus little reason to
engage in legitimation. A highly institutionalized alliance like NATO em-
bodies clearly defined mechanisms that trigger the alliance’s operations (for
example, Article V), standard procedures to smooth military coordination,
and consultative processes among member states behind closed doors.
In theory, such an alliance is a well-oiled machine whose operations
require only minimal mobilization of the public. One purpose of NATO’s
institutionalization was to render extensive, and always uncertain, domestic
legitimation unnecessary. When global security institutions are weaker,
however, the legitimation of grand strategy can play a vital role. Mechanisms
of coordination are then not automatic, public support is not assured, and
mobilization is necessary.
The upshot is that legitimation matters most to grand strategy when
the boundaries of legitimate behavior and policy are fairly clear but when
the institutions enforcing them are fairly weak. These dynamics hold with
respect to the domestic politics of national security as well as in the inter-
national security arena. It is thus no surprise that the Concert of Europe had
a deep impact on its members’ behavior, as Jennifer Mitzen argues in her
contribution to the special issue. Although the Concert had few concrete
means of bringing its members to heel, it nevertheless prevented Russian in-
tervention in the Greek Revolt of 1821. The very weakness of the Concert’s
institutions required its members to mobilize their fellows for the Concert to
work. The Concert merely supplied foundational principles that could not be
contravened and a forum in which member states had to advance publicly
acceptable reasons for joint action. Contestation was rife, and the fate of
coordinated action lay in these debates, highly visible to elite strata across
Europe.
52 As Waltz notes, his theory draws from analytic economic theory, where “economic units and
economic markets are concepts, not descriptive realities or concrete entities.” See Waltz, Theory of
International Politics (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1979), 89. See also the discussion in Stacie E. Goddard
and Daniel H. Nexon, “Paradigm Lost? Reassessing Theory of International Politics,” European Journal of
International Relations 11, no. 1 (March 2005): 23–29.
The five aforementioned hypotheses suggest when legitimation can play

a significant role in the formulation and operation of grand strategy. But not
all efforts at legitimating strategy succeed. The articles in this special issue
are full of instances in which politicians, even skilled orators, fell short
in their attempts to legitimate their preferred strategies—from Wilson, who
floundered in his efforts to ratify the League of Nations, to Winston Churchill
and Roosevelt, who could not mobilize their respective publics against the
Nazi threat as early as they would have liked. Sometimes they succeeded too
well—as with Truman, whose legitimation of containment locked the United
States into a costly global Cold War.53 Why legitimating appeals silence
competitors, or fail to do so, is necessarily central to this special issue and is
the subject to which we now turn.
WHO WINS THE WAR OF WORDS?
If legitimation is a war of words, what distinguishes the winners from the

losers of rhetorical battle? Why are some efforts to legitimate grand strategy
more successful than others? Although we leave it to the articles themselves to
carry the bulk of the theoretical weight in answering these crucial questions,
here we introduce a general framework. While processes of legitimation are
in principle open—anyone can attempt to legitimate grand strategy using
whatever language they would like—a pragmatic model of legitimation sug-
gests, as Williams has argued, that “in practice [they are] structured by the
differential capacity of actors to make socially effective claims[,] . . . by the
forms in which these claims can be made in order to be recognized and ac-
cepted as convincing by the relevant audience, and by the empirical factors
or situations to which these actors can make reference.”54 In other words,
explaining rhetorical power cannot just be a matter of conforming to the
linguistic rules of a given domain.55 Five factors shape which legitimation
attempts succeed and which fail: (1) who speaks, (2) where/when they say
it, (3) to whom they say it, (4) what they say, and (5) how they say it.56
53 See the discussion in George, “Domestic Constraints,” 249–51.

54 Michael C. Williams, “Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics,” Interna-
tional Studies Quarterly 47, no. 4 (December 2003): 514.
55 In his seminal theory of speech acts, J. L. Austin pointed out, rightly, that some utterances—such
as saying “I do” at a wedding or making a promise—were themselves actions, and he argued that the key
to their productive effect was their conformity to linguistic rules. This has found its way into international
relations via theories of securitization. See John L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, 2nd ed.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); on securitization, see Barry Buzan et al., Security: A
New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998); Thierry Balzacq, ed., Securitization
Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011).
56 See, similarly, Holger Stritzel, “Towards a Theory of Securitization: Copenhagen and Beyond,”
European Journal of International Relations 13, no. 3 (September 2007): 357–83; Thierry Balzacq, “The
Three Faces of Securitization: Political Agency, Audience and Context,” European Journal of International
Relations 11, no. 2 (June 2005): 171–201.
The arguments developed in this special issue’s articles thus revolve around
some combination of speaker, context, audience, content, and technique.
(1) Speaker. As the literature on “securitization” has emphasized, not
everyone “can ‘do’ or ‘speak’ security successfully,” and some are “more or
less privileged in articulating security.”57 And, as Pierre Bourdieu observed,
linguistic power is underpinned by the “belief in the legitimacy of words and
of those who utter them.”58 Some have authority to legitimate policy, while
others shout from the sidelines. Some enjoy credibility as spokespersons for
the public interest, while others are dismissed as self-serving. Some are more
able than others to transcend rhetorical constraints and creatively design
novel legitimation strategies. For some contributors to this special issue,
authority is a function of institutional position: Tjalve and Williams, as well
as Krebs, analyze the power of the presidency. For others, actors’ authority
is embedded in their history and experience, as Snyder’s account of Wilson
suggests. In general, whether or not legitimation succeeds is deeply shaped
by who may speak with respect to national security, where the origins of their
authority lie, and whether the authority to speak security is concentrated, in
officialdom, or diffuse, extending to civil society.
(2) Context. The battle over legitimation in the national security arena is
also shaped by the institutional and discursive context: where and when they
speak. Institutions affect not only whether legitimation is required and is po-
litically significant but also how legitimation contests play out. Institutional
rules may grant some agents authority to speak security and impart agenda-
setting power to others. Those rules may also make subsequent challenge
easier or harder, by subjecting officials to regular oversight or shielding them
from it. The more institutional rules provide openings to opposition politi-
cians or civil society to express alternative perspectives, the less enduring
legitimation victories are. Mitzen’s and Snyder’s articles in particular explore
how institutional rules, both domestic and international, shape the dynamics
of legitimation.
Legitimating grand strategy depends upon the discursive context as well.
Like other structures, discursive structures vary in their degree of slack: they
can be very tight, reducing choice so dramatically that individuals feel suf-
focated, or they can be very loose, allowing individuals to perceive a world
of possibility.59 During “settled” times, a dominant discourse constitutes an
unspoken common sense, and elites on both sides of debates must legiti-
mate their preferred policies in its terms. Challenges to grand strategy during
such periods of routine politics are normally narrow. Those who ignore
57 Buzan et al., Security: A New Framework, 27, 32.

58 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Matthew Adamson and Gino Raymond
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 170. See also Michael C. Williams, Culture and Security:
Symbolic Power and the Politics of International Security (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2007), 64–66.
59 On settled and unsettled times, see Swidler, “Culture in Action.” See similarly Bob Jessop, The
Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods (New York: New York University Press, 1982), 167–69.
these discursive constraints when engaging in legitimation meet with a rude

reception: leading elites and mainstream media either ignore them or treat
them as beyond the bounds of respectability. In contrast, during “unsettled”
times, debates over national security are comparatively unstructured. Pol-
icy positions that had once seemed obvious, even common sense, become
subject to widespread public challenge. Policy positions that had once been
thought beyond the pale become legitimate, with advocates both more nu-
merous and more respectable.60 At these times, “policy entrepreneurs” enjoy
the freedom to redefine the national interest and to advance new construc-
tions of threat.61 Moreover, because these are also moments of “ontological
insecurity,”62 in which publics are eager for a rhetoric that resupplies nar-
rative order and re-grounds political identity, ambitious agents’ efforts to
reconstruct the national interest are more likely to be well received. The
role of the discursive context in closing off or creating openings for change
makes at least a cameo appearance in all the essays but figures especially in
Goddard’s and Krebs’s contributions.
(3) Audience. Audiences are central to rhetorical battle, for it is they
who determine the victor. The combatants are working not solely, nor even
primarily, to persuade each other, but to mobilize the support of key con-
stituencies behind their preferred strategy. This is challenging in large-scale,
diverse polities with multiple constituencies. A policy justification that res-
onates with one constituency may strike another as illegitimate. When le-
gitimation reinforces societal cleavages or appeals too narrowly, it cannot
mobilize the support necessary for grand strategy. Both Tjalve and Williams,
and Snyder, explore how political leaders formulate effective legitimation
strategies in fragmented societies. Crafting legitimations that appeal simul-
taneously to domestic and international audiences is especially tricky. Such
cross-pressures, Goddard shows, ultimately undercut Hitler’s efforts to le-
gitimate his claims to a British audience. For analytical purposes, we have
theorized this as a two-step process. In reality, the steps are less distinct, and
legitimating appeals call audiences into being. Audience remains the most
60 For further discussion of how one distinguishes settled and unsettled times, so as to avoid the
charge of tautology, see Krebs’s article in this special issue. See also Ronald R. Krebs, Narrative and
the Making of U.S. National Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), chap. 2;
Krebs, “How Dominant Narratives Rise and Fall: Military Conflict, Politics, and the Cold War Consensus,”
International Organization (forthcoming).
61 Such unsettled times are thus the structural condition most conducive to the exercise of agency. On
these “critical junctures,” see Giovanni Capoccia and R. Daniel Kelemen, “The Study of Critical Junctures:
Theory, Narrative, and Counterfactuals in Historical Institutionalism,” World Politics 59, no. 3 (April 2007):
343; Hillel David Soifer, “The Causal Logic of Critical Junctures,” Comparative Political Studies 45, no. 12
(December 2012): 1572–97.
62 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991),
35–63. For an application to international relations, see Jennifer Mitzen, “Ontological Security in World
Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma,” European Journal of International Relations 12, no. 3
(September 2006): 341–70.
undeveloped of the factors in this special issue’s research articles, regrettably

reflecting the literature as a whole.
(4) Content. To recognize that what political actors say—the content
of their legitimating appeals—matters is not to say that some arguments are
naturally more persuasive or compelling than others. Whether framing is
effective depends on whether the deployed frames draw on and are consis-
tent with common rhetorical formulations or sit in tension with them. This is
what is meant by the elusive notion of resonance and its absence. Whether,
therefore, the assertion of an existential threat strikes audiences as plausible
and even convincing, or as inflated, is related to how the content of the claim
intersects with existing patterns of legitimation. Legitimations that prove res-
onant at one time subsequently silence speakers, by threatening to impose
costs when speakers seek to part ways with their past resonant rhetoric. The
content of legitimation figures in every article in this special issue, especially
those by Mitzen and Goddard.
(5) Technique. The fate of legitimation rests not just on what is said but
how it is said, or rhetorical technique. Speakers strike audiences as skilled
based in part on what metaphors, analogies, figures of speech, and tone they
choose, as well as how they conform to the rhetorical conventions associated
with particular forms of public address, or genres.63 Such analysis can get
very fine-grained and contextually specific. We, therefore, focus on rhetor-
ical mode. Following Jerome Bruner, we distinguish between two modes:
argument and storytelling.64 Argument, whether instrumental (outlining costs
and benefits) or normative (appealing to consensual values), seeks to per-
suade the audience of the correctness of a course of action, while stories
(or narratives) seek to explain a series of events to an audience that either
knows itself to be confused or whom the speaker believes to be confused.
Arguments presume, or at least pretend, that the audience shares certain
understandings—metrics by which to weigh costs and benefits, norms by
which to assess conformity or violation—whereas storytelling provides the
bases for those shared understandings and potentially sets the terrain of
argumentation. In this special issue, Krebs’s and Snyder’s articles focus on
what makes storytelling powerful, how actors construct “winning” narratives,
and how dominant narratives tilt the tables in favor of particular policies, but
also on the limits and vulnerabilities of storytelling rhetoric.
63 On metaphors and tone, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980); Roderick P. Hart et al., Political Tone: How Leaders Talk and Why
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). On genres, see Norman Fairclough, Analysing Discourse:
Textual Analysis for Social Research (London: Routledge, 2003), chaps. 4–6; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell
and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Deeds Done in Words: Presidential Rhetoric and the Genres of Governance
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Campbell and Jamieson, Presidents Creating the Presidency:
Deeds Done in Words (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
64 Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986),
esp. 1–14.
The effects of legitimation are not constant through time and space. The
goal of the articles in this special issue is not to develop a timeless and uni-
versal theory of legitimation and grand strategy, but rather to analyze how
different configurations of these five factors have shaped grand strategy’s
constituent components. Nor do the articles adopt the same approach to
common methodological challenges. Those include notably: establishing the
independent causal effects of rhetoric while avoiding charges of tautology,
and sustaining claims regarding the content and mode of a speaker’s legiti-
mation strategy, amid the sheer torrent of words. Each effectively addresses
these two concerns, but they do so in different ways, appropriate to the
questions they ask and to their cases’ particular institutional and political
context and their location in historical time. In the next section, we briefly
present this special issue’s substantive contributions through the frame of
this introductory essay’s analytical categories.
THE SPECIAL ISSUE IN CONTEXT
At the heart of grand strategy lies a definition of the national interest. Appro-
priately, this special issue begins with a question that Vibeke Schou Tjalve
and Michael C. Williams argue lies at the heart of postwar classical real-
ism: how can a liberal state articulate a national interest and have a grand
strategy, if its citizens are but egoistic utility maximizers and if its politics
is nothing more than competition among these individuals and the interest
groups they freely form? At the dawn of the Cold War, “republican” real-
ists such as Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
feared that, thanks to a vacillating and fickle mass public, to political insti-
tutions that erred on the side of paralysis, and most importantly to a liberal
politics that denied any grand collective vision, the United States was not up
to the challenge of confronting the Soviet threat. Given the great need for
mobilization and the substantial visibility of the national security domain, and
per our expectations, these realists recognized the profound role for public
talk in making grand strategy possible and even successful. They hailed the
capacity of speaker and content—of presidential initiative and a “rhetoric
of collective purpose”—to unify the body politic and construct the national
self. At the same time, they feared that America’s leaders were increasingly
drawn to the rhetorical excesses of threat inflation and globe-spanning cru-
sade. The republican realists’ solution to this dilemma is surprising, at least
in light of our preconceptions. They argued that successful legitimation, bal-
anced with responsible leadership, rested on a particular rhetorical form,
the jeremiad, whose religious moorings would resonate with the American
public but whose emphasis on critical introspection would circumscribe the
crusading impulse. For them, public rhetoric was at its best not a manip-
ulative tool cynically deployed by demagogues to clear opposition out of
the way, but the crucial means through which the nation was itself defined,
democratic deliberation made possible, leaders held to account, and prudent
grand strategy forged.
In the next article, Jennifer Mitzen takes up the creation of collective
purpose as well, though in the context of international politics rather than
foreign policy: how do states, caught in the pull of conflicting national inter-
ests, come together to act as a collective unit in the global arena? The puzzle
of cooperation has long engaged international relations theory, and the Con-
cert of Europe—as a signal break from zero-sum competition in great power
politics—has prominently featured as a case for contending theories of how
institutions shape behavior.65 Challenging the existing literature, Mitzen ar-
gues that the Concert’s institutions were far too weak to ensure compliance
either by structuring material incentives or building shared identity. Rather,
she contends, public talk is essential to the process of how states coalesce
around collective intention and how institutions shape their members’ sub-
sequent behavior. The rhetoric of “European unity” brought Russia into the
Concert, but then forestalled Russian intervention in the Greek Revolt. The
content of legitimation is central to the story: Castlereagh’s and Metternich’s
appeals to European unity, to norms of intervention and collective action,
resonated strongly with Tsar Alexander. But even more important, Mitzen
maintains, was the institutional context: the concerted action of the Concert
required the mobilization of other parties, and claims-making took place in
public forums that rendered visible potential ruptures of the European se-
curity order. These were, then, ideal circumstances for legitimation to exert
real impact on politics, even though the Concert’s powers of punishment
and socialization were weak. These forums forced European statesmen to
legitimate their stances in the language of shared European norms, made
it less likely they could openly invoke self-interest, and thereby compelled
them to act contrary to their interests and even to redefine their interests—as
the tsar discovered.
The rest of the special issue explores the other key component processes
of grand strategy—identifying threats, devising remedies, and mobilizing the
home front. In the third research article, Stacie E. Goddard takes up a familiar
puzzle: why Britain chose to appease Nazi Germany in the 1930s. As Britons’
65 See, among others, Richard N. Rosecrance, Action and Reaction in World Politics: International
Systems in Perspective (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 73–76; Robert Jervis, “Security Regimes,” in Interna-
tional Regimes, ed. Stephen D. Krasner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 173–94; Jervis, “From
Balance to Concert: A Study of International Security Cooperation,” World Politics 38, no. 1 (October
1985): 58–79; Paul W. Schroeder, “Historical Reality vs. Neo-Realist Theory,” International Security 19,
no. 1 (Fall 1994): 108–48; Louise Richardson, “The Concert of Europe and Security Management in the
Nineteenth Century,” in Imperfect Unions: Security Institutions over Time and Space, ed. Helga Haftendorn
et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 48–79; Branislav L. Slantchev, “Territory and Commitment:
The Concert of Europe as Self-Enforcing Equilibrium,” Security Studies 14, no. 4 (October–December
2005): 565–606.
attention turned to the growing power of Germany, the British government

sought to divine Germany’s intentions. It was not as much Germany’s actions
or its material capabilities that shaped the British perception of the German
threat as the resonant content of Hitler’s rhetoric. By justifying Germany’s
revisionist aims in terms of national self-determination and equality, the
Nazi leader persuaded the British that the German threat was a limited
one, addressable via appeasement and not requiring rapid rearmament. For
rationalist models of signaling, it is puzzling why the British took Hitler
seriously, since his legitimation of Germany’s moves was classic cheap talk.
Goddard argues that British officials believed Hitler’s claims to be meaningful
because they resonated so strongly with Britain’s deep commitment to the
liberal norms that Hitler invoked. When Hitler deviated from this language,
as he did in the months following the Munich crisis, his revisionist demands
looked far more aggressive, and Britain’s policy became correspondingly
more confrontational. Goddard makes clear not only the significance of
public rhetoric in shaping the dynamics of the balance of power, but also
the tight links among grand strategy’s components: a limited definition of
the German threat narrowed dramatically the range of acceptable policy
instruments and the capacity of the British government to mobilize societal
resources.
That troika features also in Ronald R. Krebs’s article on the same period
in US history. He asks why as brilliant an orator and masterful a politician as
Roosevelt met with such uneven results in his various campaigns to shape
the underpinnings of national security debate in the late 1930s and early
1940s. Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR failed to render illegitimate the
noninterventionist view of the national interest and global scene. Once the
United States entered the war, it was Roosevelt’s portrait of the adversary
as the Nazi regime, rather than the German people, that held sway. Krebs
argues that the crush of events alone cannot account for these diverse out-
comes. Nor can the public demand for legitimation and the government’s
need for mobilization, which set the stage for FDR’s legitimation to have an
impact but were elevated in both cases. He points rather to the intersection
of discursive context and rhetorical technique, of the rhetorical demands
of the environment, and of the rhetorical mode the president adopted. De-
spite increasingly unsettled times, Krebs contends, Roosevelt shied away
from storytelling rhetoric, missing a crucial opportunity to shunt aside the
noninterventionist opposition. He typically emphasized instrumental argu-
ment (the costs and benefits of intervention), and his impoverished narrative
lacked specific protagonists or events. The president’s rhetoric was then mis-
matched to the moment, and noninterventionists retained legitimacy. In the
wake of Pearl Harbor, in contrast, FDR developed a vibrant security story
well-suited to the unsettled times. He narrated the threat the Nazi regime
posed to the democratic world and its values. His insistence that it was
Hitler, the Nazis, and the militarists that lay behind German aggression was
hardly natural, but it became so dominant that Roosevelt himself could not
depart from it—even when he desired and sought to, three years later. The
success of legitimation, Krebs emphasizes, does not lie in technique, discur-
sive context, or authority alone—but in their proper alignment.
The special issue’s final article, by Jack Snyder, also focuses on the role
of rhetorical leadership in mobilizing support for key foreign policy initiatives
and takes on a seminal case: Woodrow Wilson and the fate of a liberal inter-
nationalist grand strategy. With elites actively debating the nation’s response
to the war in Europe, the matter was unquestionably visible, and Wilson had
to mobilize a coalition in favor of intervention across disparate factions. The
circumstances were thus ripe for legitimation to prove critical. Indeed, in
Snyder’s account, Wilson’s efforts to forge a “winning coalition”—first (suc-
cessfully) on behalf of intervention and later (unsuccessfully) for sustained
US engagement via the League of Nations—hinged not on the interests of
the median voter or on conventional logroll tactics but on Wilson’s qualities
as a speaker and on his rhetorical technique. The key to his effectiveness
in mobilizing Americans around his liberal internationalist vision, and later
to his downfall, was his heavy reliance on the storytelling mode. Rather
than advancing instrumental arguments to persuade the public, Wilson told
a story about the Great War as, in Snyder’s retelling, “a world-historical
juncture that pitted a teleological trend toward global democracy against a
countertrend in modern warfare that was on a path to destroy democracy.”
His vague, emotive, and often contradictory appeals coopted his opponents’
most powerful arguments and made possible an interventionist coalition
despite the deep fissures of ideology and interest that cut through the US
body politic. Yet the elusiveness that had sustained Wilson’s call for inter-
vention would also prove the League of Nations’ undoing, as critics such
as Henry Cabot Lodge highlighted the ambiguities in Wilson’s legitimation
of the League. As any student of rhetoric knows, and as Snyder’s analy-
sis emphasizes, there are no rhetorical silver bullets—despite what today’s
Washington spinmasters often suggest. Nor is legitimation effective because it
transcends the political context. Rather, legitimation works when it is deeply
attentive to coalitional politics, allowing potential allies to grasp hold of a
common vision and doing an end run around would-be alternative factional
combinations.
CONTINUING THE CONVERSATION:

LEGITIMATION ON THE RESEARCH AGENDA
Much of international relations is talk. State representatives argue, threaten,

reassure, flatter, cajole, and lie—all in an attempt to further their goals in
international politics. So ubiquitous is talk that we tend to see it as back-
ground noise, banal, and hardly worthy of scholarly study. This introductory
essay and this special issue as a whole seek to undercut this view. Public
talk is not peripheral to foreign policy, even in the security arena where
the stakes are high. Nor though, as we have stressed throughout this essay,
does it always exert much of an effect. Legitimation’s impact is contingent
on the visibility of policy and the government’s need to mobilize. But once
policy is visible and mobilization is necessary—as is often the case with
grand strategy—legitimation is vital. Without attention to legitimation, we
cannot fully unpack the formation of the national interest, the construc-
tion of threat, the mobilization of domestic audiences, or the selection of
means.
Public talk is not a “master variable,” but it does often have independent
effects on foreign policy and, thus, deserves to be examined on its own terms.
We have argued that its dynamics cannot be reduced to either the transmis-
sion of potentially credible information or material self-interest. Indeed, fo-
cusing on legitimation is one way to transcend the ideational/material divide
in the study of world politics. Legitimation is deeply embedded in culture: ac-
tors cannot but draw from existing cultural resources to justify their political
projects. But legitimation also takes place in a material context of resources,
institutions, and coalitional politics to which effective political actors must
be attuned. The articles in this special issue establish that understanding and
explaining the impact of public rhetoric requires, in given empirical contexts,
theorizing at the intersection of the speaker’s authority, the institutional and
discursive context, the constitution of the audience, the fit between legitima-
tion and the larger universe of rhetorical commonplaces, and the speaker’s
choices with respect to technique.
Most broadly, thinking about grand strategy in terms of legitimation
shifts discussion away from the common question of whether actors care
more about legitimacy or power and interests to how actors legitimate their
pursuit of power and interests and when they do so effectively. Legitimation
neither competes with nor complements power politics: it is power politics.66
Triumph in the public contest over social meaning affects the distribution of
capabilities, actor identities, and even their visions of political possibilities.
It marginalizes some voices, rendering them effectively silent, while it em-
powers others to effect political change. Those who cannot legitimate their
preferred strategy are, as Morgenthau argued, “at a great, perhaps decisive,
disadvantage in the struggle for power.”67
Politicians have long understood that the effective pursuit of interest is
bolstered by claims to legitimacy and that legitimacy and power are inter-
twined. Our theories should recognize the same. This special issue is just a
66 Janice Bially Mattern, “The Concept of Power and the (Un)Discipline of International Relations,”
in The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, ed. Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 691–98.
67 Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 2nd ed. (New York:
Knopf, 1954), 61–63.

start, not the last word. If it is successful, it will help clear the way for further
research into its two central animating questions: (1) when does legitimation
matter most centrally to political processes and outcomes in general and to
national security politics and policy in particular? and (2) who wins the battle
to control the rhetorical playing field in the security arena?
To start building a solid theoretical foundation, the articles in this special
issue explore cases stretching back over the last two centuries. But the
last two decades have witnessed important changes in communications and
information technologies, the nature of authority, and the scope of audiences
that bear on both these questions. In the age of social media, and of large-
scale leaks of classified data, it seems increasingly difficult for governments
to keep anything secret for very long; one effect of the information revolution
has been to make policy (in our terms) more visible and thus perhaps to
have increased dramatically the demand for legitimation. If this is right, then
legitimation has become only more important in the politics of national
security. Yet international institutions and law have also thickened across
many policy domains, including security—which, if our earlier hypotheses
have merit, should render legitimation less consequential.
At the same time, legitimation has become more difficult. Trust in tra-
ditional leaders has eroded, and institutional platforms for speaking have
proliferated, expanding the circle of those who are authorized to address
national security questions in the public sphere. If all can lay claim to au-
thority, then it becomes even harder to secure the rhetorical upper hand.
Thanks to a twenty-four hour news cycle, information is plentiful and
cheap. Those who are passionate about politics can feed their passion more
richly than ever, while those who care little about politics can find ever
more ways to avoid learning about it. While the internet does not appear
to be producing ideological echo chambers, as many once feared,68 it has
contributed to building audiences that are smaller and more knowledgeable
but also more ideological and partisan.69 The breadth of today’s audiences
68 On the echo chamber hypothesis, see Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2001). For evidence of selective exposure, see Natalie Jomini Stroud, Niche News: The
Politics of News Choice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). However, for persuasive evidence to
the contrary, see Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, “Ideological Segregation Online and Offline,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics 126, no. 4 (November 2011): 1799–839; Michael J. LaCour, “The Echo
Chambers Are Empty: Results from Erie to Arbitron,” presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest
Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, 2014; R. Kelly Garrett et al., “A Turn Toward Avoidance?
Selective Exposure to Online Political Information, 2004–2008,” Political Behavior 35, no. 1 (March 2013):
113–34. Selective exposure may take place only among the most politically engaged; see Henry Farrell,
“The Consequences of the Internet for Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 15 (June 2012): 42;
Markus Prior, “Media and Political Polarization,” Annual Review of Political Science 16 (May 2013): 123.
69 Markus Prior, Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political
Involvement and Polarizes Elections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See, relatedly,
Bruce Bimber, Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Matthew Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
puts a premium on multivocal rhetoric, which can in principle mobilize a

crosscutting coalition, but it is hard to craft such a rhetoric when attentive
publics are so polarized. Leaders who employ multivalent rhetoric are also
always vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy, and they are especially vulnerable
when every rhetorical misstep is captured on a smart phone. In short, the
challenge of speaking legitimately to diverse and only partially overlapping
audiences is intense—and growing ever more so.
If these claims seem dizzying and contradictory, that has been our intent.
There remains much we still do not understand about legitimation and global
politics, which simply means that there is much work to be done. We hope
others will join us in taking up the challenge.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For comments on previous drafts, we thank Markus Kornprobst, Paul Mac-

Donald, Jennifer Mitzen, Jack Snyder, Vibeke Schou Tjalve, Michael C.
Williams, and the participants in the 2011 workshop, “Language and the
Politics of Grand Strategy.” We are especially grateful to Security Studies’
anonymous reviewers and editors, whose careful reading of our initial sub-
mission proved very helpful.
FUNDING
For support of the collective project, we acknowledge the financial support

of the International Studies Association, which funded the aforementioned
workshop.

Rhetoric Legitimation and Grand Strategy

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Rhetoric Legitimation and Grand Strategy

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Security Studies

ISSN: 0963-6412 (Print) 1556-1852 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsst20

Rhetoric, Legitimation, and Grand Strategy

Stacie E. Goddard & Ronald R. Krebs

Published online: 11 Mar 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 4458

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 24 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

Rhetoric, Legitimation, and Grand Strategy

STACIE E. GODDARD AND RONALD R. KREBS

This introductory framing paper theorizes the role of

actors go about rendering particular policies legitimate.1 This special issue

when legitimation is most likely to have an impact on strategy. Third, we

CENTRAL CONCEPTS: GRAND STRATEGY AND LEGITIMATION

In Paul Kennedy’s well-known formulation, grand strategy brings a nation’s

How Legitimation Shapes Grand Strategy

the menu of policy options is constituted, and audiences are mobilized.

W. Norton, 2005), 229, 247.

understand the national interest to be nothing more than the aggregation of

plausibly invoke legitimate international norms to explain behavior, such as

University Press, 1989 [1970]).

The Roots of Legitimation

Political Science,” Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 4 (December 2003): 695–706.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 104.

37 Hanrieder, “The False Promise of the Better Argument.”

Journal of International Studies 31, no. 3 (July 2002): 629.

THE LEGITIMATION OF GRAND STRATEGY:

Legitimation is so commonplace that we might be tempted to conclude that it

FIGURE 1 When legitimation matters.

In Figure 1, we combine these two dimensions to generate claims about

42 Kennedy, “Grand Strategy in War and Peace,” 4–6.

covert operations, from the arming of rebels to the assassination of foreign

(New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2007).

48 Schweller, Unanswered Threats.

to foreign affairs, rendering policy effectively invisible. When their contribu-

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

The five aforementioned hypotheses suggest when legitimation can play

WHO WINS THE WAR OF WORDS?

If legitimation is a war of words, what distinguishes the winners from the

53 See the discussion in George, “Domestic Constraints,” 249–51.

57 Buzan et al., Security: A New Framework, 27, 32.

these discursive constraints when engaging in legitimation meet with a rude

undeveloped of the factors in this special issue’s research articles, regrettably

THE SPECIAL ISSUE IN CONTEXT

attention turned to the growing power of Germany, the British government

CONTINUING THE CONVERSATION:

Much of international relations is talk. State representatives argue, threaten,

Knopf, 1954), 61–63.

puts a premium on multivocal rhetoric, which can in principle mobilize a

For comments on previous drafts, we thank Markus Kornprobst, Paul Mac-

For support of the collective project, we acknowledge the financial support

You might also like