President Obama’s grand strategy is often framed by some social and political actors as lacking ‘conceptual coherence’. This paper makes the case for a poststructuralist perspective that examines discursive practices of these actors to produce critical analysis of the US grand strategy. Through interpretive analysis, this research attempts to discover how competing policy actors construct their contending narratives and communicative actions to represent the ‘conceptual incoherence’ of the administration’s strategic actions. Then by focusing on argumentation, it addresses responsive discursive practices and struggles by the Obama policymakers over conceptual framing of foreign policy problems and interpretation of their outcomes. Finally, based on “discursive institutionalism’’ (a theoretical stance brought about by the ‘argumentative turn’), this paper seeks to establish whether communicative interactions among these actors contributed to the reframing of discursive interpretations by the official policy-makers and changes in institutional rules and norms governing their actions.
