Title: From Shield to Sword: The Expanding Discourse of Deterrence in U.S. Policy (2024–2025)

Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, deterrence has undergone a semantic and strategic shift in the U.S. political from a narrowly defined doctrine of nuclear and military restraint to a broad justification for pre-emptive and punitive state action. This paper analyzes via a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), political speeches, policy statements, congressional testimony, and executive communications from 2024 to 2025. This study analyzes how deterrence has been rearticulated and reconstructed as a catch-all framework used to legitimize aggressive military posturing and domestic securitization. Preliminary findings suggest that U.S. policymakers increasingly use the seemingly defensive and peace-oriented portrayal of deterrence to legitimize aggressive and interventionist policies, both at home and abroad. This paper argues that the discourse on deterrence is no longer merely a used to support a defensive posture, but increasingly invoked as an active tool to justify violent border enforcement, military interventions abroad, and quasi-military force on the domestic level. This discursive shift masks coercive practices under the disguise of strategic restraint, enabling broader acceptance of aggressive policies. Furthermore, the reconstruction of deterrence toward pro-active and potentially pre-emptive military action risks leading to a discursive normalization of the threat or even potential use of nuclear weapons, especially in light of the Trump administration’s renewed advocacy for developing tactical nuclear weapons. This reconstruction suggests a troubling normalization of coercive logics within both foreign and domestic policy spheres. Drawing on critical security studies, this paper argues that this discursive evolution reflects and reproduces broader shifts in the usage and understanding of political and military power in the U.S. Ultimately, this paper contributes to debates on securitization, militarization, and the weaponization of language in liberal democracies.