Narrative Case Study: Do the Foreign Policy Narratives of the United States Stem from a Political Agenda of Do the Narratives Constitute Policy?

The foundational logic behind the US’s Europe-facing policy agenda is an ideological relic from a bygone era, constituted by the United States’ identity as a hegemony. The shifting of world power relations is creating a system of international relations defined by integration, investment and the warming of relations between nations who once were each other’s antagonists. However, some ideological regimes are incongruous with change. Shaped by the systemization of ideas of hegemony as a set of cultural norms in WWI and the validation of American exceptionalism post WWII, American foreign policy appears locked in a recursive perception of the world order that even our allies no longer see. Due to the very nature of the ideological imperatives that are required of a hegemony to maintain its position, the US risks slipping into a deterministic frame of thinking that could cost more than it has previously gained. These principles or pillars, as we will call them, represent a continuity of ideas in the genealogy of American social and political discourses that are embedded in the cultural and ideological foundations of the United States. In the case of the Nordstream 2 pipeline, the American and German positions embody this dilemma. The rigidity of this system of beliefs appears to be creating two spheres of interests that have become so divergent that they risk losing the ability to communicate with one another on rational terms, charged by an ideological understanding of contemporary political reality.