Narrating future war: Reimagining enmity during the collapse of bipolarity

Abstract

This article examines the discursive processes of forming and becoming to better understand how narratives shape what matters in international relations. Focusing on elite debates on future war, the article explores how political agents within the US defence establishment reimagined the international system during the demise of the hegemonic interpretative framework that had shaped the postwar order. While events are often seen as driving political agents’ interpretations of structural change in the international system, the direction of causality can be inverted. The article argues that the reconstruction of enmity during the collapse of bipolarity should be understood as an assemblage of existing narrative elements into a new security story. This solidified only after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was used to validate the discursive route already taken by key players. As the article concludes events shape but do not determine how conceptions of what matters in international politics evolve and how future war is narrated and reimagined.

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know . . . it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult one. (Donald Rumsfeld, 2002)

Introduction

In March 1914, four months before the start of the First World War, the prolific English journalist and writer Henry Brailsford predicted that ‘In Europe the epoch of conquest is over, and . . . it is as certain as anything in politics can be, that the frontiers of our modern national states are finally drawn.’ He noted further that ‘If war should break out, it will be for some stake in the Near East or in China, and it will end without territorial changes in Europe.’ While Brailsford could not have been more wrong, he is in good company when it comes to failures in deciphering developments in international security. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was as unforeseen by many experts and pundits as the Japanese military attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, the terrorist hijacking of planes to hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, or the dramatic rise of the Islamic State in 2014.

The inability to correctly interpret what matters in international politics is often treated as a mistake in judgement or as a problem of incomplete information. However, it is better understood as the inability to predict the future. There is a desire to know what the future of war holds, even if this can never be satisfied. After all, planning for future war requires preparations for armed conflict that may take place years or even decades from the present without knowing who and where the enemy is or what technological advances will have been made. Planning for future war is a balancing act that presupposes that we have a conception of what we know and what we don’t know. It assumes that we can anticipate the unknown by expecting it. What is ‘unthinkable’ – the unknown unknowns that Rumsfeld referred to – is from the outset moved beyond the field of uncertainty. The problem that it is impossible to anticipate what cannot be expected remains unaddressed.

In what follows, I offer an account of how political agents narrated future war in US defence planning processes before and after the disordering event of the end of the Cold War. To date, research on narrating war has focused primarily on the memory of war and commemorative practices. This includes: (1) problematizing efforts by the British state to create a war story of unity that portrays Britons as standing alone in adversity during World War II, with Winston Churchill standing at its centre as the country’s saviour (Travers and Ward, 2015); (2) the utility of personal writings as a source for the study of lived experiences in warfare, such as the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Kennedy, 2013); and (3) better understanding how ordinary people commemorate Ukraine’s contemporary fight against Russian military aggression through different types of visual language to narrate soldiers’ sacrifice in the name of the nation and the country’s fight as a righteous and noble struggle (Glew, 2023).

My endeavour is to capture in motion the semiotic work that elite political agents do in narrating future war. It is situated within the narrative turn in the study of international relations, which has placed conceptual and empirical attention on political stories. Regardless of whether they assume that political agents have significant influence over narrational elements or that the latter exert considerable staying power because of their embeddedness and sedimentation, a key focus of such works has been on what storylines do and how they produce effects (Krebs, 2015; Miskimmon et al., 2013; Roselle et al., 2014; Shepherd, 2015). Much of the existing research implies that security stories do not simply lie around; they are composed, performed, and contradicted by political agents for specific audiences and purposes. This has often emphasized a strategic intentionality associated with narrative processes of activating and deactivating plotlines, however, which risks centring research on unanswerable questions about political agents’ ‘true motives’ (Krebs and Jackson, 2007: 36).

In this article, I focus on elite debates within the US defence establishment over how enmity was reimagined during the demise of bipolarity. ¹ This focal point is used to illustrate empirically how a narrative analysis which moves beyond purpose and intention towards forming and becoming can capture how dominant conceptions of what matters in international politics emerge from ‘embryonic possibilities for reimagining the international system’ (Lerner and O’Loughlin, 2023: 2). Miskimmon et al. (2013) ² have shown that narratives are dynamic, undergoing a circuit of formation, projection, reception and adaptation. My analysis explores how a new storyline emerges once a previously powerful story reaches an ‘endless cycle of discord’ and the narrative lifecycle restarts (p. 158). It is based on the premise that multiple, disjointed authors and audiences produce and ingest narratives that are not fixed to either a narrator or a specific context. ² I focus on the processes that do the forming of the stories political agents situated within the US government tell rather than their final form or political agents’ strategic goals. This centres narrative analysis onto a ‘field of possibilities to be actualized along divergent lines of becoming’ (Ansell Pearson, quoted in Loots et al., 2013: 108–125). It also brings us ‘closer to the action as experienced by the agents themselves – in all its fragmentation, incoherence, and ambiguity’ (Roberts, 2006: 712).

The article proceeds as follows: the first section discusses how future war was envisioned in US defence policymaking before the collapse of bipolarity with a focus on potential conflict scenarios. In the second section, I illustrate how an emerging regional focus in preparing for future war developed within the US force planning community, which enabled the retention of key elements of US Cold War defence strategy. The third section explores how Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait was represented as proof for the key elements of this new security imaginary, driving a new post-Cold War plotline about future war towards broader acceptance. The article suggests that while the transformation of competing voices within security establishments into harmonized plotlines in the absence of a settled discourse is not accidental, it resembles a game of billiards, in which players set one ball in motion to collide with another and where the wider horizontal effects can be estimated but are outside of their direct control. As this article shows, narrating future war stitches together (re)constructions of past armed conflict with a desire to hedge against the uncertainty of what lies ahead, making the future legible in familiar terms. What matters in international relations becomes thinkable through recognizable stories of future war.

Imagining future war before the collapse of bipolarity

How nations articulate security threats plays an important part in crafting, sustaining and institutionalizing what challenges and opportunities lie ahead in international politics. In this process, narrating future war sets out who the potential adversaries in upcoming conflicts might be, what those enemies might do, and how the armed forces would need to be structured and equipped to carry out an appropriate military response (Kaufmann, 1992: 27). Despite the complexity and uncertainty inherent in thinking through what the future will hold, the clearer the security imaginary about future war is, the more straightforward is the process of force design.

In the US, the narration of future war throughout the Cold War was firmly anchored in the threat emanating from the Soviet Union. For four decades, dividing the world through stories of irreconcilable differences between the US and the Soviet Union, in which the US was fronting the ‘good’ side, lay at the heart of America’s characterizations of the international arena, its actors and norms of conduct (Homolar, 2022; Restad, 2015). This provided the discursive anchor for US defence strategy as well as for the military missions, means and capabilities derived from it. Notwithstanding changes in political leadership in the Soviet Union and in the US government, the US defence establishment enjoyed a high degree of continuity in orienting both force planning and narrating future war around the threat posed by Soviet expansionism, aggression and Communist ideology. While uncertainty permeated narrating future war, in the sense of both ‘analytic uncertainty’ about the intentions of the Soviet Union and ‘strategic uncertainty’ about its capabilities (Iida, 1993), who the primary adversary would be was not questioned.

Even if the Cold War era was marked by significant continuity in the overarching discursive framework of enmity, the type of hostilities that were envisioned did not stay static and encompassed a range of possible situations and outcomes. During the early Cold War, for example, US force planning efforts identified specific future conflict scenarios that projected either that the Soviet Union would pursue a nuclear attack on the US with little warning or that the Soviet Union or one of its communist allies would launch conventional attacks in Europe or Asia (Kaufmann, 1992: 17, 28–30). Fighting a global war against the Soviet Union and defending Western Europe against the peer competitor initially guided the bulk of US force planning and the procurement of weapons systems (Gargan, 1999: 225). From the Kennedy administration onwards, however, US engagement in regional contingencies within and outside Europe – rather than a major military confrontation between the superpowers mirroring World War Two – played an increasingly important role in envisioning future war and determining the structure and size of the armed forces as well as their fielding priorities (Department of Defence, 1976: 114, 1984: 191; Nixon, 1970: 129; Troxell, 1997: 3–6). By the 1980s, the idea of fighting more than one major regional contingency alongside a large-scale military engagement with a peer competitor was firmly embedded in US strategic thinking and framing.

The collapse of bipolarity removed a cornerstone in the US narrative repository used to substantiate the idea that a sprawling military apparatus was essential to mitigate against future military conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies. From the moment President George HW Bush took office in January 1989, he faced calls for changing the direction of – and rationale for – US war planning. But the growing realization that a process of significant transformation was not only unfolding at considerable speed but also upending security narrative frameworks did not translate into a quick shift away from fastening US threat perceptions to the ‘Red Scare’. One key theme promoted by the Bush administration was that there remained significant uncertainty about the breadth and depth of glasnost (openness – of the political system) and perestroika (reconstruction – of the Soviet economy) as well as about the intentions of the General Secretary of the Communist Party since 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet Union and its political leadership, so the story goes, should continue to be met with scepticism; optimism about a more peaceful international environment was wholly misplaced (Bush, 1989; Friedman, 1989: 8).

Through much of President Bush’s first year in office, the administration engaged in a narrative balancing act between acknowledging some change was taking place in the international environment while denying its relevance, substance and permanence. Arthur Schlesinger, the late historian and former special assistant to President John F Kennedy, observed in May 1989 that the Bush administration negated the transformation underway in the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe (Schlesinger, 1989, also Kegley, 1989: 723) by:

fall[ing] back into the comfortable platitudes of the old Cold War . . . One has the impression that [George Bush], a man of unimpeachable good will, is the prisoner of a bunch of foreign policy hacks whose idea is to greet every new problem with old clichés.

In the course of 1989, the Bush administration was unable to articulate a security imaginary that moved beyond seeing the Soviet Union as the primary source of enmity and threat, which shines through in its planning for future war. In March 1989, the President initiated a large-scale review of national security through issuing the National Security Review (NSR 12) (The White House, 1989b). This previously classified document officially set in motion the process of revamping the structure and role of the armed forces. Yet NSR 12 displayed reluctance to depart from longstanding strategic thinking. Rather, it made the case for a continuation of US Cold War planning, in which preparation for future armed conflict was centred on maintaining US military might, both by expressing doubts about the extent of changes underway in the Soviet Union and by directing attention towards ‘Third World’ regional adversaries.

While the administration eventually committed to moving ‘beyond containment’ in August 1989 (Gates, 1989: 3), the National Security Directive (NSD 23) issued by President Bush on 22 September 1989 reiterated that ‘the Soviet military threat has not diminished’ (The White House, 1989a: 2) – even though the Bush administration had been informed four months earlier that the Soviet leader had unilaterally cut defence spending (Tyler and Smith, 1989: 1). A Pentagon report, dated 13 May 1989, also argued that a diminishing Soviet military threat would not necessarily translate into a more benign international environment but instead reveal a ‘long obscured . . . set of global defense imperatives’, particularly from well-armed Third World powers, as well as ‘linkages between terrorists, insurgents and the narcotics traffickers’ (cited in Tyler and Smith, 1989). Its key point was that the US military was likely not equipped to deal with what were described as greater security challenges.

Throughout 1989, the US defence establishment generally displayed a noticeable lack of enthusiasm for casting aside well-worn scripts that saw hard power as the answer to most if not all security questions by both military and civilian force planners. Yet when Communist rule in Eastern Europe ended with astonishing speed and the Berlin Wall collapsed overnight, not acknowledging the profoundly altered international security environment became untenable. The end of the Cold War stripped away both the basis of envisioning future war for 40 years and the consensus over what matters in international politics.

War planning for alternative futures

With the clear dividing line that split the world into spheres of enmity and security erased at the end of the Cold War, what challenges would the US face that required a military response? What would the future of war look like, now that the ‘evil empire’ was no more? Who should serve as the chief antagonist in America’s hero–villain security stories (Homolar, 2022)? In the US defence establishment, the process of making discursive sense of the role for America’s vast military apparatus in this new era was marked by struggles between ‘preservers’ and ‘innovators’ over planning for future war (Stritzel, 2014: 124). But, although the security imaginary of the Cold War no longer made sense, the narration of what type of conflict the US would encounter and how it would be fought that had underwritten US defence policy for decades persisted beyond bipolarity: traditional war against one or more hostile states and a potential military confrontation with a peer competitor. At the same time, a new story about future war was pushed by the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, and this centrally featured uncertainty – not only as a term to designate unpredictability as an incessant feature of the new security environment but also as the primary threat to US national security.

President Bush’s Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and his Deputy Paul D Wolfowitz were the key civilian defence strategists in rethinking the future of war during the systemic rupture that ended 40 years of bipolarity. While Cheney, at that time, enjoyed a long-standing reputation as a ‘consensus builder’ (Lott, 1989), both he and Wolfowitz were hesitant to acknowledge the significance of the changes taking place in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries. Instead, they expressed suspicion over the motives and trajectory of their superpower adversary. Reluctant to frame the international developments underway as durable, Cheney and Wolfowitz disagreed with then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell about the need to cut military capabilities and overhaul US force structure (Jaffe, 1993: 34–35; Larson et al., 2001: 10).

In the Office of the Secretary of Defense, civilian-led planning for revisiting the role and structure of the armed forces had begun under Wolfowitz shortly after the Bush administration’s issuing of NSR 12. However, little more than a week after the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989, Congress pressed for a post-hoc redirection of approved defence funds to US domestic programs in recognition of the altered security environment. The changes taking place in Europe had now become too hard to brush aside. The scenarios that envisioned Warsaw Pact states as conflict parties in future war, which the Office of the Secretary of Defense had developed in late 1989 to underwrite the defence budget, were now obsolete (Almond, 1990; Lewis et al., 1992: 23; Snider, 1993: 19).

The prospect of Congress redirecting defence funds served as a wake-up call to shift war planning away from future conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies. A key document to do so was the classified Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) developed in November 1989, which was officially issued by the Secretary of Defense on 24 January 1990. This underscored an ongoing need for a strong US military, but addressing potential threats in the less developed world rather than the ‘evil empire’ now served as the centrepiece of planning for future war (Snider, 1993: 15). As civilian force planners intensified their efforts to develop a ‘regional defense strategy’ focused on threats by potential Third World adversaries (United States Congress, 1990), new scenarios about what threats the future would hold were required.

Rearticulating the rationale for force design based on a projected world in 1997 became a key task. Wolfowitz assigned this to Principal Deputy Undersecretary for Strategy and Resources Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby and Assistant Deputy Undersecretary for Resources and Plans Lieutenant General (ret.) Dale A Vesser in February 1990 (Jaffe, 1993: 31; Snider, 1993: 15). To address the lack of credible scenarios to underwrite US force design for a world in which old imaginaries of (in)security had lost their validity, Vesser and Libby crafted a set of three ‘alternative futures’. These speculated about trends in the international environment in general – and in Europe and Russia, the Middle East and Northeast Asia in particular – to develop a post-Cold War defence strategy that was based on specific sets of military capabilities demanded by each of the possible scenarios for future war (Jaffe 1993: 32; Snider, 1993: 16).

The first alternative future envisioned a world of benign ‘competitive growth’ in which the US could rely on a crisis response/reconstitution strategy by retaining large reserve forces to respond to any emerging threats. The second future focused on a ‘troubled Third World’, in which the US would require larger and more forward deployed active force capabilities than in the first scenario. The final future projected a continuously ‘turbulent Soviet Union’, in which the US would need to maintain much of its Cold War capabilities. The force redesign derived from combining all three scenarios about alternative futures was supposed to be put into practice with only marginally fewer financial resources than requested in the defence budget submitted to Congress two months earlier. A key part of the rationale for considering this range of alternative scenarios in force design was that it allowed for a quick reversal of any downsizing process and hedged against unknown adverse developments associated with Soviet intentions.

When President Bush (1990c) presented the outcomes of the defence planning process to Congress in March 1990, he explained to lawmakers that the US would adapt its defence strategy to the new international environment by making its military forces ‘smaller, more agile, and better suited to likely contingencies’. Key elements of Cold War defence planning, such as maintaining substantial nuclear and conventional forces in Europe, would nevertheless be retained. Importantly, the presumed ‘growing sophistication of Third Word conflicts’ was represented in the 1990 National Security Strategy as placing serious demands on the American military (The White House, 1990: 25–27). A White House Fact Sheet on the National Security Strategy Report in March 1990 underscored that the US indeed needed improved capabilities to address the ‘unique requirements posed by potential Third World battlefields, themselves growing in complexity and lethality’ (Bush, 1990d).

By the time President Bush entered his second year in office, what Ó Tuathail (1992: 447) describes as ‘the unreconstructed Cold War reflex in the administration’ had gradually given way to narrative building blocks to plan for future war that were united in their pessimism about a more peaceful international system. A storyline had begun to form around the understanding that a world without the Soviet Union would not be more stable or more peaceful, but the opposite. While the threat that the confrontation with the ‘evil empire’ had posed to US national security for four decades was declared familiar and predictable (Payne, 2001: 88–89, 2003: 423–426), the shift away from a world with easily-drawn lines between friend and foe assumed a decidedly negative, threatening character.

The emerging regional focus in planning for future war was not yet grounded in an overarching narrative that both acknowledged the diminished Soviet threat and provided evidence to justify basing the shape of the future force on ‘Third World’ threat scenarios. The purpose of a continued policy of strength, even if it was arguably instrumental in bringing the Soviet Union to its knees, remained unclear – and was unlikely to withstand the scrutiny of a cost-conscious Congress and a peace dividend-demanding public. An important task left for the Bush administration was to sell the objective of retaining much of the US’s Cold War military might to Congress and the public (see McGroarty and Dooley, 1990). To do so, the story that the future is not only uncertain but dangerous required a recast of the main characters.

Preserving military superiority beyond bipolarity

In the spring of 1990, the Bush administration came increasingly under bipartisan attack from Congress for continuing to ignore the significance of the changes that had taken place in the world within the last year. When the March 1990 National Security Strategy argued that it was necessary to ‘preserve a capacity for reversibility’ as a ‘prudent hedge against uncertainty’, this had no narrative pull because it lacked a clearly identifiable agent of threat responsible for the presumed condition of future insecurity (The White House, 1990: 24). As Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, pointed out to fellow lawmakers, the administration suffered from a ‘threat blank’. And what was on offer by the Pentagon on assessments of security needs was, according to Nunn (1990), ‘rooted in the past’.

To demonstrate that the Bush administration was responding to the changes in the strategic environment, on 6 June 1990 Cheney publicly indicated for the first time that the Department of Defense might be willing to undertake major force reductions (Jaffe, 1993: 35). Less than one week later, he announced a potential 10 percent cut in the defence budget (Lardner, 1990: 6–9; Lewis et al., 1992: 27). Yet, many questions over the details of translating the proposed cuts into a long-term strategy remained unresolved within the Bush administration and the Pentagon (Kaufmann, 1992: 3; Larson et al., 2001: 20; Towell, 1990). There was also an ongoing reluctance to envision the future as potentially more benign, combined with a belief that hedging against uncertainty was both prudent and necessary. For example, on 22 June, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Powell (1990) underscored that the Pentagon was planning for ‘a changing world, not a changed world’ and needed to plan ‘against all futures’. Settling on comparatively limited cuts signalled, however, that overwhelming military superiority became an end in itself, regardless of the particularities of danger (see Homolar, 2011; McCain, 1990). Despite the vagueness of villains and a plot to substantiate the Bush administration’s narrative for future war, by mid-1990 a discursive compromise had begun to take shape that anchored the need for US military hard power in a world that was no longer characterized by an imminent Soviet threat. The unifying element was a story that centred on preserving as much US military strength as politically possible, regardless of whether, how, and how lastingly the world was changing.

At the time Iraq invaded its small but oil-rich neighbouring state of Kuwait on 2 August 1990, the need for military superiority had already (re)emerged as a key trope in US post-Cold War security discourse. At the Aspen Institute in Colorado on the very same day, when President Bush explained to the American public that the threat of a global war was receding, he explicitly used the actions of the Iraqi dictator as evidence to support his administration’s position that now was not the time for complacency. ‘Even in a world where democracy and freedom have made great gains’, Bush (1990b) warned, threats ‘wholly unrelated to the earlier patterns of the U.S.–Soviet relationship’ were emerging, demanding ‘a strong and an engaged America . . . . The brutal aggression launched last night against Kuwait illustrates my central thesis.’

Beginning with the President’s Aspen Institute speech, the Bush administration seized the opportunity to substantiate the narration of future war with ‘real world’ evidence (Correll, 2003: 5). In the weeks that followed, the President frequently also evoked associations with the international community’s failed appeasement strategy against Nazi Germany to lend weight to the administration’s interpretation that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was a serious international threat, an analogy long associated with US military responses to security problems (see detailed Record, 2005: III–VI). On 8 August, for example, Bush (1990a) stated that ‘Half a century ago, the world had a chance to stop a ruthless aggressor and missed it. I pledge to you: We will not make that mistake again.’ With Iraq’s invasion of its neighbour, the ‘Third World countries’ that force planners had begun to utilize in the abstract in planning scenarios as a new type of powerful enemy prior to the collapse of bipolarity were suddenly propelled into central view.

As regurgitations of a ‘peace through strength’ narrative trope surfaced alongside the theme that the future was complex, volatile and dangerous, Iraq’s attack on Kuwait served as the prime example to validate the new focus of US defence planning: developing countries in possession of advanced weaponry that were potentially armed with weapons of mass destruction. A memorandum on themes to be adopted by the President on the administration’s Gulf crisis policy underscored that ‘this is a defining moment for the new world order’ (Sittmann, 1991: 1). As archival documents on the preparation of Bush’s 1991 State of the Union Address reveal, the administration also nurtured the idea that overwhelming US hard power brought about America’s victory against the Soviet Union, and that preserving military might must form a cornerstone in US post-Cold War force planning as an essential condition for a peaceful world. ³ Large-scale regional aggression had given a new lease of life to the idea that American military superiority had a fundamental purpose in the new world order.

While the events in the Persian Gulf lent much-needed credibility to the administration’s narrative that a regional approach to post-Cold War defence policy based on military might was indispensable, the absence of specific scenarios continued to spur Congressional criticism that planning for future war was removed from credible underpinnings to justify its costs and execution (Schmitt, 1992). Acknowledging the need for a comprehensive strategic foundation for the future shape and role of the US military apparatus, the Office of the Secretary of Defense eventually initiated the development of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DGP). In June 1991, the preliminary results of this planning process were sent to key players within the Pentagon. This declassified DPG briefing set out that developing the rationale for post-Cold war force planning should focus on the lessons learnt from Desert Storm – the US-led military campaign to force Hussain’s retreat from Kuwait in early 1991 – and that the formal defence planning guidance document, to be finished by December, should contain a thorough characterization of the regional focus of new defence strategy and offer specific scenarios to underwrite it (Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, 1991: 2, 6–8). The DPG briefing document also underscored that force planners were now able to move forward with finding ‘strong, compelling, and persuasive answers to fill in [the Bush administration’s] purported blanks in the strategy’ (Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, 1991: 5, 25). Iraq-style regional conflict was retrofitted into planning for future war to navigate the changed international security environment within the existing interpretative framework, and to avert a sweeping overhaul of the US military apparatus.

When a first draft of the formal DPG was circulated in September 1991, the handwritten title page to the 67-page document warned recipients that the course of events underway in the dismantling of the Soviet Union made it difficult to continue to use threat scenarios that featured the former evil empire (Vesser, 1991: I). But the draft itself insisted that the world was a dangerous place because of, rather than despite, the diminishing Soviet threat (Vesser, 1991: 5). The end of bipolarity was cast as giving way to a ‘fluid and uncertain’ strategic environment where challenges to US interests ‘will develop with little or no notice’ (pp. 18–19, 23). The loss of the US’s chief antagonist was no longer the core of a security story about the prospect of a more peaceful international environment. Rather, it became the central element in a plot about escalating third-world threats in which the need for a powerful protagonist persisted because of the end of the superpower confrontation. Despite some changes in terminology and the addition of more specific sections, the blueprint for US defence strategy laid out in this first DPG draft remained largely unchanged until the final draft of the DPG was issued on 29 February 1992 (Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1992; also Vesser, 1992).

Referencing President Bush’s Aspen Institute speech as articulating ‘a new, regionally oriented, national defense strategy’, Powell’s (1992) National Military Strategy eventually translated the DPG plans for future war into force requirements to deter a second conflict when preoccupied by a first major regional contingency while also preserving the capacity to counter a potential peer competitor (Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1992; see also Gerlach, 1992). The following year, Cheney’s (1993) Regional Defense Strategy became the first major official and unclassified document after the end of the Cold War to explicitly call for the ability to fight more than one Desert Storm-type regional contingency concurrently (Larson et al., 2001: 13–16; Troxell, 1997: 12). With the publication of this first post-Cold War US defence strategy just before the one-term Bush administration left office, a consensus on ‘how to fill in the blanks’ was now firmly in place. For war planners, the geopolitical map was redrawn, and the US would remain on top.

In the marketplace of narrative ideas, the US defence establishment had an opportunity to fundamentally change how the country prepared for future war. And yet, even if previous threat scenarios were replaced, US force planning remained anchored in what had long been thinkable: the story that it was necessary to have the military capabilities to fight two major theatre wars simultaneously as well as fighting a global war against a peer competitor. US military superiority persisted as the principal answer to questions about what mattered in international security. Given the reluctance of the US defence establishment to move away from the past in preparing for future war, despite a systemic shock that removed its arch enemy of 40 years, it is unsurprising that the tragic events of 11 September 2001 served to accelerate and intensify – rather than fundamentally transform – existing trends in preparing for future war (see Homolar, 2023). This is more so, considering many of the crucial players during the end of bipolarity had by then returned to government as central figures during the George W Bush administration. Yet when the US used military force in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the global war on terror, over time neither theatre required the large conventional war-fighting capabilities that US force planners had anticipated. The country was ill prepared for involvement in non-traditional conflicts and became bogged down in two long-running asymmetric conflicts, conducting counter-insurgency operations with troops that were initially insufficiently trained and ill-equipped for such operations. This points to the potentially disastrous effects of holding on to the narrative past as a blueprint for preparing for future war.

Conclusion

How does the narration of future war shape what matters in international relations? A critical factor complicating assessments about the prospects for war and peace is ‘that prediction is often purposeful, closely bound up with advocacy, and so is about the present as much as the future’ (Freedman, 2017: 286). Narrating future war tends to sweep under the rug the problem of unthinkability; events that lie outside the realm of expectations are unforeseeable. Whether such incidents are positive or negative, because they are unthinkable they cannot be prepared for. Planning future war is instead based on ‘thinkable’ events, even if the probabilities of their occurrence and their adverse effects are unknown. This turns an ‘uncertain world into a world of so-called calculable “risk”’ (Blyth, 2009), into known unknowns. In narrating future war, the terminology of uncertainty is nevertheless employed to suggest that we can foresee what matters in international politics and can hedge against unknown unknowns. Indeed, in the US, ‘uncertainty’ is a key rhetorical device used to justify defence and security policy agendas, weapons programs and defence budgets.

Focusing on discursive processes of forming and becoming with in elite debates on force planning, this article has shown that political agents within the US defence establishment began to re-envision future war well before the end of bipolarity. The detailed reshaping of international imaginaries, however, developed only incrementally from recombining past understandings of global security dynamics with new events. As we saw, significant effort was devoted to first denying the scale of change underway in the Soviet Union and later to dampening any euphoria that emerged when the process of transformation accelerated across Central and Eastern Europe. New narrative themes that gradually took shape within the US policy community at the time the Cold War drew to a close shared a scepticism about the prospect of a more peaceful ‘New World Order’ and worked in tandem to preserve core tenets of past planning for future military conflict rather than abandoning the war-footing the US had been on for four decades. The concept of ‘peace through strength’ assigned responsibility for the changes underway in Europe and the Soviet Union to America’s ability to successfully and relentlessly pursue a security strategy based on military might; it is a story of triumph for the US, not a story of loss for the Soviet Union.

Even if it could be accepted that the nature of international security was changing in the context of the transformations in the Warsaw Pact states and the Soviet Union, the US simply could not be sure about either how reversible this situation might be or whether the future would be more benign. Indeed, the changing international security environment was quickly described as inherently more dangerous, not equally or less threatening than during the decades-long conflict with the Soviet Union, which was perforated by devastating wars including in Korea and Vietnam. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait not only drove forward the development of a new security plotline but also validated the idea that interstate war rather than civil wars or conflict with non-state actors should take priority as the organizing principle for US defence policy. Interpreting events such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as the marker of a new era in international security was an agentic process that set important precedents for future imaginaries and actions.

A focus on the forming and becoming of narratives reveals how contestations over plot and characters often draw on existing interpretative frameworks, even in the absence of a settled discourse. Narrating future war is not removed from the past and present, on the contrary. How force planners, political agents and the public think about the next war is ‘colored by what has been’ (Barno and Bensahel, 2018). As Khong (1992: 6) has underscored, ‘policymakers look to the past to help them deal with the present.’ Exploring the narration of future war ‘in motion’ also allows us to see that political agents inject what they cast as main characters and storylines in relevant policy discourses in anticipation of major international changes taking place, even before they have occurred. In the case of planning for future war within the context of the end of bipolarity, militarily inferior developing states were narratively manoeuvred into the position of the principal threat to US national security prior to the end of the Cold War. Filling the vacuum of enmity that had opened in US security discourse with new threats relied on the ability of political agents to furnish the narrative of an inherently dangerous post-cold War international order with evidence of instability and insecurity.