Her research interests lie at the intersection of security, language and political psychology. Her work has been widely published in journals such as Security Dialogue, European Journal of International Relations, Journal of Strategic Studies, and Review of International Studies.
Homolar applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Uncertainty Doctrine: Narrative Politics and US Hard Power after the Cold War, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Uncertainty Doctrine is the fourth page of Chapter Four titled ‘Wars on Multiple Fronts’. Its main paragraphs focus on describing how, when Communist rule in Eastern Europe ended with astonishing speed and the Berlin Wall collapsed overnight in 1989, the basis of US force planning for forty years became obsolete. That is, in the absence of a powerful enemy opposed to American security interests and ideals, the threat scenarios and contingencies that had underwritten US defense strategy for nearly half a century suddenly lost their political purchasing power. Force planners abruptly found themselves in a domestic setting increasingly weary of sustaining a large defense sector, with Congress and the public increasingly demanding a rethink of US defense policy and the reduction of military budgets. But, so the main argument on page 99 goes, even if interpreting the new world order was marked by struggles between ‘preservers’ and ‘innovators’ over the direction of US defense policy, the opportunity to achieve a far-reaching revision of US defense priorities did not translate into a substantial change in force planning and military organization. Page 99 then explains how the remainder of Chapter Four shows in detail that the process of negotiating the post–Cold War reorientation of US defense strategy fostered, for the most part, window dressing for strategic models that resembled Cold War templates and carried over entrenched interests within the defense planning community. While the security narratives of the Cold War no longer made sense, key elements persisted to direct force planning far into the future. Hedging against uncertainty emerged as a useful policy tool and as an ideational resource in defense policymaking processes to simply ‘go on’ despite a moment of fundamental rupture.Learn more about The Uncertainty Doctrine at the Cambridge University Press website.
If a browser opened The Uncertainty Doctrine on Page 99, readers would get an excellent idea of the entire book. As it is perhaps one of the very best single pages that both browsers and readers could land on at random to find a summary of the central argument of the book, the test worked surprisingly well in this case.
The Uncertainty Doctrine tells the story of how the transition from the ‘before’ to the ‘after’ of the Cold War took place in US defense policy. It was motivated by trying to understand what I have termed ‘the case of the missing peace dividend’, a puzzle that I spent the better part of two decades trying to unravel. Despite persistent claims that defense spending cuts after the end of the Cold War hollowed out the US military and undermined the opportunities provided by the ‘unipolar moment’, this did not happen. The entire accumulated ‘peace dividend’ from the fall of the Berlin Wall until US defense spending sharply increased again after 1998 before skyrocketing during the Global War on Terror equated to less than nine months of the annual US defense budget for 1989.
The main focus of The Uncertainty Doctrine is going through the messy ‘middle parts’ of how we got to where we are at the end of the post-Cold War interregnum, paying particular attention to the discursive negotiation processes that took place within the US defense establishment. By taking a step back in history, by rummaging through its dustbin, the book shows how political agents engaged in hard-fought contests over owning the narrative of what the post-Cold War world looked like and what this meant in practice for the US. It explains that narrative politics – defined here as the discursive contests over what plots, characters, and meanings should define the New World Order – instead of events in the international environment shaped the orientation of US hard power after America triumphed over its arch enemy after forty years of conflict. While narrative politics may not always matter in US defense policy, at moments of rupture it can be decisive in why some strategic responses prevail over possible alternatives.
--Marshal Zeringue
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