The end of the Cold War presented a watershed opportunity to scale back U.S. defense commitments, yet no such “peace dividend” emerged. In The Uncertainty Doctrine: Narrative Politics and US Hard Power after the Cold War, Alexandra Homolar tackles this puzzle by interrogating the narrative politics of how the U.S. defense establishment interpreted this changed international environment and reached a new narrative consensus about the security imperatives of the post-Cold War era. Tracing narrative contestation from the late 1980s through the 1990s, she conducts case studies of the rise of the “rogue state” as the primary threat to U.S. security, the sustained consensus around the security imperatives of U.S. military supremacy, and the shifting rationale to justify a missile defense system. From these debates emerged what Homolar identifies as the “uncertainty doctrine”: a bundle of narratives framing the United States as a hero facing a diffuse and often faceless enemy that created continuity in U.S. defense policy (23). Neither this strategic continuity nor the narrative was inevitable; rather, agents constructed arguments to sustain the status quo through contested processes of renegotiating security narratives, which eventually destroyed the peace dividend.

Homolar expertly navigates the twists and turns of post-C