Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Abstract

Not simply an event or merely an incident, 1962 standoff between United States and Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba was a crisis, which subsequently has achieved almost mythic significance in annals of U.S. foreign policy. Jutta Weldes asks why this occurrence in particular should be cast as a crisis, and how this so significantly affected the national interest. Here, Weldes analyzes so-called Cuban missile crisis as a means to rethink idea of national interest, a notion central to both study and practice of international relations.Why did presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba constitute a crisis for U.S. state officials and thus a dire threat to U.S. national interests? It was, Weldes suggests, more a matter of discursive construction than of objective facts or circumstances. Drawing on social theory and on concepts from cultural studies, she exposes realities of crisis as social creations in service of a particular and precarious U.S. state identity defined within Cold War U.S. security imaginary. Constructing National Interests shows how this process allowed for a redefining of identities, interests, and likely actions of various states, so that it seemed to logically serve U.S. national interest in removing missiles from Cuba.

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