SPIN is delighted to share a new essay by final-year Politics & International Relations student Shae Miles. This essay was written as part of Shae’s excellent work on the US Foreign Policy unit this year at the University of Bristol.
US foreign policy is shaped by historical memory, not only by what is remembered but also by what is erased or silenced. This essay, therefore, seeks to answer the question: ‘How, and why, has ‘silencing the past’ been used in US foreign policy from Kennedy to G.W. Bush?’. This essay draws closely on the claim of Philpott and Mutimer (2009: 309) that: ‘the ontology of US foreign policy is premised on a moral distance from its previous crimes and misdemeanours, about which it has no capacity for sustained moral reflection’. Thus, by drawing on various illustrative examples of how and why historical memory has been silenced in US foreign policymaking from 1961-2009, this essay argues that the silencing of the past is an implicit but powerful driver of US foreign policy that functions across time. In arguing that silencing the past occupies a distinct dimension of historical memory in US foreign policy, the argument developed in this essay is two-fold. It argues that silencing the past is derived from American exceptionalism in that it manifests as a sense of ignorance of other historical and cultural contexts in its policymaking outlook rooted in American superiority and serves to preserve the belief in exceptionalism to the American public so as to frame activist foreign policies as always fundamentally ‘good’ and therefore, justified. Relatedly, it argues that silencing the past is utilised by policymakers to construct and preserve an American identity of innocence on the world stage so as to maintain the moral authority it holds as part of its global leadership status. As such, this essay is structured as follows: it briefly outlines the existing literature on historical memory in US foreign policy before turning to the main body of the essay. Here, it first explores ‘how’ silencing the past is relevant to US foreign policy by examining the two main, interrelated ways in which it is used in practice, that of neglecting historical context in the present and the selective portrayal of history. It then unpacks ‘why’ silencing the past has been a constant feature in US foreign policy over time, examining how it enables the preservation of American exceptionalism at home and the protection of its moral authority abroad.
An examination of the literature on US foreign policy over the last century reveals that history shapes how the US engages with the world (Brands and Suri, 2015). The influence of history in US foreign policy is most established in the scholarly literature in regard to the use of historical analogies, as policymakers across time have drawn similarities with the past to make sense of the present situations they face (Leffler, 2005; Houghton, 1996). Whilst this use of historical memory was primarily understood in foreign policy analysis as being a tool of rational decision-making, research developments in recent years have suggested that it also serves as a rhetorical tool of ideologically driven policy justification which ‘forces history into a deliberately persuasive role’ (Mumford, 2015: 3). Such selective remembrance of ‘ideologically convenient moments in history’ (Mumford, 2015: 15) inevitably involves other historical facts or events being ‘forgotten’ or silenced (Klymenko and Siddi, 2020; Zehfuss, 2006). Thus, in what has been referred to as the act of ‘silencing the past’ and the ‘erasure of historical memory’, (Trouillot, 1995; Sirvent and Haiphong, 2019), there has been an increasing consideration of the (ab)use of history as a significant aspect of US foreign policy in the scholarly literature. However, previous insights have tended to focus on specific historical periods or phenomena which have been silenced, such as US colonialism and genocide (Trouillot, 1995) and the use of torture before the Global War on Terror in US foreign policy (Klein, 2005). Therefore, this essay seeks to enrich the existing commentary on the use of historical memory in US foreign policy by examining the phenomenon of silencing the past across time.
Firstly, silencing the past in the practice of US foreign policy can be understood as the way in which history is neglected during policymaking when responding to a perceived threat in the present. In other words, foreign policymaking often involves a silencing of historical context and cause, whereby the story arc of events effectively begins with the threat facing the US, which obscures various relevant causal and contextual elements (Mumford, 2015). For example, Dóminguez (1993: ix) argued that ‘U.S policymakers often ignore the particularities and significance of “small countries” such as Cuba and Vietnam, treating them as “just a locale”, and in doing so, US administrations effectively deprive the situations they face of a broader historical and contextual reading and subsequently adopt a one-dimensional interpretation of events. For instance, Vietnam was seen as a matter of containing the Soviet Union and China in the US’ fight against international communism as per the logic of the domino theory that if South Vietnam fell to communism so would other countries in Southeast Asia (Herring, 1991). This perception of the situation revealed considerable neglect of Vietnam’s historical context, specifically its enduring struggle against French colonialism and its nationalist fight for independence (Herring, 1990). Such inattention to the real start of the story of the tensions in Vietnam reflected the US’ ‘abysmal ignorance of Vietnam and the Vietnamese’ (Herring, 1990: 14). Moreover, the failings of US administrations to look beyond the perceived threat at hand is well illustrated in the US’ immediate response to the 9/11 attacks as encapsulated in the question of “Why do they hate us?” (Bush, 2001). This question, which pervaded the American psyche and the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror discourse, characterised the attacks as a complete ambush on the American nation’s way of life of freedom with no reflection upon the broader context of the US’ impact on the broader world, notably its complicity in past regional destabilisation in the Middle East (Philpott and Mutimer, 2009). This negligence of historical context and the related causal factors during policymaking in times when a threat is perceived constitutes an important way of silencing the past in US foreign policy
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Another way in which the silencing of the past is relevant to the practice of US foreign policy is the selective remembrance, reinterpretation and moral distancing from acts of past violence. In this sense, ‘forgetting enables ways of remembering that exclude the morally repugnant, the politically painful and the historically undesirable’ (Philpott and Mutimer, 2009: 302). This application of silencing the past relates to how historical events are selectively portrayed afterwards in the historical memory of US policymakers. For instance, despite the interlude of US self-examination after Vietnam during the Carter years, the re-emergence of the US during the Reagan years and the portrayal of Vietnam since has largely been rendered by administrations as a strategic mistake as opposed to an act of imperial violence. Furthermore, the enduring notion of the Vietnam syndrome following the Vietnam War, which encapsulated American reluctance to commit to American military involvement abroad (Herring, 1991), primarily focused upon American suffering and loss during the war whilst effectively ‘forgetting’ the extent of its actions and moral and human consequences beyond its own people (Philpott and Mutimer, 2009). As noted by Herring (1990, 12), ‘The South Vietnamese were the real losers of a long and bloody war. We lost a great deal of blood and treasure, our pride, our ‘perfect’ record in warfare. They lost everything’. An example of this one-dimensional portrayal of Vietnam is that of the US Army’s use of the herbicide Agent Orange, being remembered as a ‘tactical defoliant’, not as a chemical weapon which ultimately caused Vietnamese suffering across multiple generations (Dung, 2022). On a broader note, the perception of the Cold War as a time of relative stability conveniently overshadows the ‘hot’ proxy wars and US-backed violent involvement in much of the Global South as it sought to contain the spread of communism. Notably, US interventions in Latin America often came at the expense of democracy and human rights- notions so central to the US’ self-image, such as the US-backed Coup in Chile in 1973 during the Nixon (and Kissinger) administration, where Chile’s presidential palace was bombed, and the democratically elected, socialist president Allende was overthrown and replaced with the brutal dictatorship of Pinochet (Shiraz, 2011; Devine, 2014). The selective portrayal of the Cold War years, at best, involves an implicit effort to silence certain historical facts and events, or at worst, according to Sirvent and Haiphong (2022: 13): ‘has us view our violent overthrows of democratically elected leaders around the globe as mere “aberrations” of what we truly represent as a country’. Another notable but perhaps less explored example is that of the US’ role in strengthening the Khmer Rouge regime to counteract Vietnam’s influence in Southeast Asia, thus, indirectly supporting the devastating Cambodian genocide from 1975-1979 (Elmhirst, 2023). The US’ involvement in one of the most horrific tragedies of the 20th century is often overlooked due to US politicians hiding its actions at the time and its aversion to accountability by obstructing efforts to establish an international tribunal years after (Kiernan, 2005; Elmhirst, 2023). Thus, silencing the past involves an implicit rewriting of history and defiance to morally reflect upon past violence or complicity, which ensures that unfavourable memories are marginalised.
Firstly, in regard to what silencing the past accomplishes in US foreign policy, this essay argues that it ensures the preservation of the US nation’s foundational belief in American exceptionalism- a belief which is arguably the most powerful narrative underpinning US foreign policy (Sirvent and Haiphong, 2019). A core trope of the belief in American exceptionalism is that of American moral superiority (Ceaser, 2012), which promotes the notion of America as an unquestionable ‘force for good’. The consequences of past US foreign policy endeavours, however, largely demonstrate a fundamental contradiction with the values associated with the American exceptionalism narrative- that of courage, unity, defence of freedom and democracy (Philpott and Mutimer, 2009). Thus, there is a need to quell past instances of the US’ morally abhorrent foreign policy actions which undermine this narrative. This is particularly important in the policymaking environment as administrations often utilise the notion of American exceptionalism as a way of garnering public support for US action abroad (Fredricks, 2014). For example, Reagan’s presidency from 1981 was characterised by the effort to rejuvenate US national pride and military strength abroad after Vietnam by appealing to the belief in American exceptionalism and the notion that ‘there was no reason for the United States to limit its actions because the US was morally superior to all other nations so whatever it did was for the good of the world’ (McCrisken, 2003: 94). This agenda required a thorough reinterpretation and selective forgetting of the American experience of the Vietnam War, whereby ‘Reagan was able, in a sense, to redefine the Vietnam experience as a victory. It was not a victory in political and military terms, but a victory of the American spirit’ (McCrisken, 2003: 104). This reinterpretation involved the convenient forgetting of My Lai (massacre) and other controversial episodes from the era. In a similar vein, the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror discourse demonstrated a striking sense of ‘national blamelessness’ rooted in American exceptionalism (James, 2003: 74), which relied on forgetting past actions which could have suggested American culpability in the 9/11 attacks (Philpott and Mutimer, 2009). As summarised effectively by James (2003: 76), therefore: ‘American exceptionalism rewrites history and timelines to make immediacy and punitive reflex action normative and to place the wounded and traumatised American body center while denying the terror it has inflicted and does inflict on other bodies’. In doing so, the US is able to convince itself of its inherently moral and ‘good’ self, thereby ensuring the preservation of a morally coherent, legitimating story to frame the context of its new interventions in global affairs to the American nation.
Secondly, silencing the past as a driver of US foreign policy ensures the protection of the US’ global moral legitimacy so as to gain and sustain international support for its foreign military interventions (Strassfield, 2005). This dimension of the use of silencing the past relates to the notion that a country’s soft power relies significantly on its foreign policies being seen as legitimate and having moral authority (Nye, 2008). It is argued, then, that the US consistently manufactures itself as the innocent victim on the global stage by silencing its past inflammatory and violent entanglements abroad, and in doing so, is able to strategically harness, and at times, overexaggerate and manipulate (Strassfield, 2008) the sense of vulnerability felt in the face of a threat to legitimise aggressive military intervention as self-defence. Most notably, the 9/11 attacks ignited the same sense of vulnerability felt during the Japanese attack on the American naval base Pearl Harbour on December 7th, 1941, with George. W. Bush addressing the nation on September 11th, 2001, to inform the public of an attack on American soil (Nielson, 2008). This sense of intense vulnerability felt by the US was strengthened through the discursive comparison to the vulnerability felt after Pearl Harbour and to a lesser but still considerable extent, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and thus played a significant part in driving the US’ response to the 9/11 attacks (Strassfield, 2005; Jackson, 2009). Specifically, in maximising the sense of vulnerability felt after the 9/11 attacks through the discourse of the Global War on Terror, the US was able to assemble an ad hoc ‘coalition of the willing’ to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In the lead-up to the invasion, the US Secretary of State presented supposed evidence to support the story of Iraqi possession of WMDs and their potential use by Islamic terrorists to the UN Security Council (Philpott and Mutimer, 2009). To ensure the plausibility of this narrative, there was a deliberate silencing of the past decade of sanctions on Iraq and more crucially, the recent historical context of the hostility between the secular Ba’athist regime and the radical Islamists that made up the US’ contemporary fear (Philpott and Mutimer, 2009). Thus, in silencing relevant historical context, the US was able to construct a foreign policy posture of innocence and extreme vulnerability. Consequently, it was able to gain support from various nations to ‘reluctantly’ pursue military action in the name of defending global freedom as a matter of moral necessity (Bush, 2003), despite not conforming with the official articulation of self-defence in the UN Charter or gaining a UN Mandate (Simuziya, 2023). This posture of innocence also involved a broader resetting of the US image as a benevolent superpower and champion of human rights so as to effectively frame the moral struggle between Bush’s ‘good’ West and the ‘Axis of Evil’ as part of the intervention justification. This necessarily involved silencing the contradictory past human rights abuses committed directly or indirectly by the US. As such, as ‘foreign policy is the face a nation wears to the world’ (Schlesinger, 1983: 1), to protect US legitimacy abroad to ensure international backing for its interventions, US policymakers strategically obscure its past actions to maintain a foreign policy posture of innocence.
However, as mentioned, American innocence is not only a matter of intentional and strategic forgetting and reinterpretation of historical context and events but also a matter of naivete and ignorance (Domínguez, 1993; Strassfield, 2005). Perhaps best illustrated in what is referred to as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy administration’s EXCOMM perceived the buildup of Soviet missiles in Cuba and the subsequent thirteen-day confrontation with the Soviet Union in 1962 as a matter of crisis between solely the US and the Soviets (Laffey and Weldes, 2008). In doing so, they crucially neglected the significance and interests of Cuba in the situation, as underpinned by its enduring tensions with the US which might have suggested other understandings of the ‘crisis’, such as that of an overreaction by the US (Weldes, 1996). Specifically, recognition of Cuba’s long history of US imperialism and post-Revolution tensions with the US due to the US’ persistent efforts to undermine the Castro-led regime, most notably demonstrated by the Bay of Pigs invasion coup attempt (Hunt, 2008), suggest that the buildup of Soviet missiles was a matter of deterrence rather than an existential threat to the US. This negligence of historical context is illustrative of an entrenched sense of ignorance in the social imaginary of the US policymaking environment which can incite unproductive interpretations of events.
Silencing the past through the neglect of historical context and the selective portrayal of history has featured prominently in US foreign policy across time to provide coherency to the narrative of American exceptionalism and to ensure the legitimacy of the US’ moral leadership on the world stage. This essay has drawn upon various examples of the US’ responses to the evolving (perceived) threat environment from Kennedy to G.W. Bush, whereby policymakers have (ab)used history through silencing the past to neglect certain histories and excuse past controversial foreign policy actions to justify present military interventions. The primary focus of this essay has been the strategic use of silencing the past by policymakers to consistently produce an image of American innocence to both the American public and the international arena. Consequently, it has examined the advantageous implications of such for administrations in justifying activist foreign policy responses, which are believed to serve the US’ national interest at the time. Moreover, the belief in American innocence that becomes possible when past violence and moral ambiguity is silenced or reframed produces a US foreign policy outlook which underestimates the importance of being attentive to the various contexts, areas and people with whom they face abroad. Thus, a sustained moral reflection by policymakers on past, present and future US foreign policy actions is critical, not just for the strategic outcomes of the US abroad but for the broader safety of the international environment.
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