Abstract
Superpowers don’t always win wars. This may seem to be a perfectly obvious fact, but it is really quite surprising in light of the focus on power capabilities—that is, military weaponry and personnel—in the study of international relations. This book examines superpowers and failure, focusing on the United States in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. In both cases, superpowers withdrew short of victory against much smaller, less well-equipped third world countries. This work focuses less on why these superpowers failed to accomplish their stated military and political goals in Vietnam and Afghanistan,1 and more on the factors that affected the way leaders explained these failures to their own people and to the world. How did leaders of powerful states present a lost war, and, in particular, how did they use television to tell the story? The answers to these questions involve understanding when and why leaders believe they have to explain anything at all, and how they shape the manner in which the story is told. Because a military defeat challenges superpower identity, this discussion directly addresses the literature on constructivism and international relations. What is particularly interesting about these cases is that dramatically different political and media systems produced remarkably similar stories.
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Chapter 1 Political Communication And Policy Legitimacy: Explaining Failure
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© 2006 Laura Roselle
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Roselle, L. (2006). Political Communication and Policy Legitimacy: Explaining Failure. In: Media and the Politics of Failure. Palgrave Macmillan Series in International Political Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983602_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983602_1
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