United States of America and the Iraq War According to Constructivism and Cultural Strategy

For constructivists, strategic culture is the product of norms and culture-bearing units such as norm entrepreneurs. They believe that the United States invaded Iraq to replace the dominant strategic cultural norms under the logic of the Cold War with a new approach, i.e., democratic regime change through preventive war. However, during the Iraq War, the proposed paradigm, advocated by neoconservative norm entrepreneurs and traditional conservatives in the Bush administration, could not take the place of the Cold War-era strategy for multilateral containment. This norm was a part of a larger revolutionary strategy that advocated the policy of preventive war and the hegemonic paradigm, promoting the US hegemon of democracy through force. The US sought to spread this new view by piloting it in Iraq in order to prove the viability and effectiveness of preventive war. New international groupings such as “coalitions of the willing” and the national security strategy of 2002 provided the documents legitimating these new policies. However, the publishing of these documents encountered strong opposition at domestic and international levels. Therefore, the American strategic culture and national security policy briefly worked with the proposed opposing neoconservative paradigm, but presently they are returning to a version of the Cold War normative paradigm. In constructivist view, the Iraq War not only was not able to show the validity of a new vision of American strategic culture, but also undercut the paradigm it was supposed to underpin.