The Specter of Liberal Benevolence: Power, Podcasts, and Perpetual Peace

This thesis attempts to understand how American hegemony is reproduced. Despite heavily criticizing American military expansion, the foreign policy elite still abet the expansion of the American military apparatus. I argue that international liberalism is used to capture the hearts and minds of the professional-managerial class. Specifically, the framings of the democratic peace theory, multilateralism, and international law soften the violent and deleterious interventionist decisions made by the foreign policy elite. Furthermore, these framings are used to academically bolster liberalism and add to their cultural legitimacy and saliency in civil society. By interrogating a podcast made by foreign policy elites, I show how podcasts function as a key site of hegemonic reproduction.