Conceptual Metaphor and US Missile Defense Preliminary Theorizing and Analysis*

WORDCOUNT: 7,983, including notes and figures. NOTE: This is a very preliminary ‘ideas paper; ’ comments are most welcome, but please do not cite or quote without permission from the author. US discourse around national missile defense (NMD) is structured metaphorically. Two metaphors in particular pervade NMD rhetoric. One likens missile defense to a ‘shield, ’ while the other equates Iran, North Korea, and (until recently) Iraq with ‘rogues ’ against whom a defensive ‘shield ’ is meant to protect. The ‘shield ’ and ‘rogue state ’ metaphors have almost become literalized, ‘common-sense’ understandings. But there is no literal truth behind these tropes. This raises three questions. First, if the ‘shield ’ and ‘rogue state ’ metaphors do not map onto objective reality, then what are they? Second, assuming the metaphors construct rather than reflect reality, how exactly does this process work—at the levels of language, the mind, and the political world? And finally, what are the implications of this reality construction for NMD politics? To explore these questions, the paper first discusses a cognitive linguistics approach called conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). After using CMT to ‘unpack ’ the ‘rogue state ’ and ‘shield ’ metaphors, the paper develops a more generalizable theory of metaphorical framing to show how metaphor shapes social cognition. It then theorizes metaphor’s political effects by sketching two ideal-typical causal pathways between metaphor and policy decisionmaking. The paper concludes with some preliminary ideas about how the ‘shield ’ and ‘rogue state ’ metaphors might have shaped NMD policy