فرناز نوری

The foreign policy of states determines the way they behave in the international arena. Accurate analysis of official foreign policy documents of a country is helpful in that it shows what the international priorities of a country are at specific periods. This article reviews the U.S. National Security Strategy documents published in 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2015 from the perspective of the perception of threats to the U.S. security and perception of the U.S. role in the world. It tries to study the differences and similarities between the Bush and Obama administrations in this regard using a Neoclassical Realist framework. The results show that the Obama administration identified a wider range of threat sources to U.S. national security while providing less detailed solutions to them. Also, as democracy promotion abroad ceased to be a priority in 2015, compared to 2002 and 2006, counterterrorism continues to be at the top of U.S. security agenda. In line with Neoclassical Realism, creation of an international order under U.S. leadership is an important priority mentioned in the NSS of 2015.

Militarization is perceived as the intentions of the military to intervene and overcome civilian procedures. The tendency for militarism generates from the military’s ambition to be dominant over procedures not commonly perceived as military. It is described as an effort “to make people accept and love war, and see it as ‘normal’” (Lutz, 2009a, in Bickford, 2015) and is usually associated with high military expenditures. On the other hand, the emergence of cyberspace has opened new capacities and paradigmatic frameworks for conceptualization of sociopolitical phenomena. The present article is concerned with the US use of Stuxnet against Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2010. While being a cyber-tool in the US hostile foreign policy against Iran, the attack is discussed in the related literature as an act of cyber-war. This article argues that besides marking a cyber-tool in the US foreign policy against Iran, the attack was part of a long term militarization process in the US cyber strategy. Relying on dual-spacization’s assumptions of physical-virtual reality and using theory-testing process-tracing as the research method, this article concludes that the militarization process whereby Stuxnet was used as an alternative to kinetic attack on Iran, dual-spacized the nature of war.