Institutional Hegemonic Resilience: Understanding the Dynamics of American Exceptionalism in the Institutional World Order

The post-world war liberal order has been primarily based on the pillars of international institutions inspired from the idea of multilateral agreements and rooted in the ideological components of Western enlightenment and liberal tradition. This orderو which has been established and consolidated by a complex set of regulations in form of international institutions, trade agreementsو and security alliances, continued to function well after the bipolar system of the Cold War, into the hegemonic US-led era. The principal ideology of this hegemony borrows its spirit from an exceptionality of identity, the much discussed, yet disputable concept of American Exceptionalism. By performing a critical discourse analysis on presidential State of the Union addresses post-World War II regarding nuclear institutional hegemony, this research identifies the way in which political identity and ideational elements, derived from the notion of American Exceptionalism, have played a key role in the strategic culture of America, shaping its grand strategies throughout the past decades to create and maintain an institutional hegemonic dominance in the global arena, and in the nuclear regime as a case study. As a result of the theoretical and critical discourse analysis combined, the concept of Institutional Hegemonic Resilience has been offered to explain the dynamics.