Legal Language in Retreat: A Neoclassical Realist Analysis of US Justifications for Sovereignty-Affecting Interventions

This paper develops a neoclassical realist account of how US administrations justify foreign and security policy decisions that affect the sovereignty of other states, with a particular focus on the changing role of international legal language in official legitimizing rhetoric. Neoclassical realism conceives foreign policy as shaped by the interaction of systemic stimuli and domestic intervening variables, especially leaders’ perceptions, strategic culture, and state-society relations. The paper advances a core hypothesis: US decisions that challenge another state’s sovereignty are co-defined by structural incentives in the international system and by prevailing domestic interpretations of national interest, threat, and order, which are aggregated into administration-specific foreign policy ideologies. Empirically, the paper adopts a comparative historical design that analyzes three episodes that speak directly to neoclassical realist debates on continuity and change in US foreign and security policy: the Johnson administration’s Johnson Doctrine and the 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic, the George W. Bush administration’s justificatory rhetoric surrounding the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the Biden administration’s response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, framed as support for Kyiv’s territorial integrity. Across these cases, the paper traces how references to international law, national interests, and norms of sovereignty are mobilized, bracketed, or reinterpreted to legitimize US policy choices. The analysis draws on presidential speeches, National Security Strategy documents, executive branch statements, and other secondary sources, employing a qualitative analysis. On the basis of this comparative foundation, the paper advances a secondary, Trump-focused hypothesis: under the Trump 2.0 administration, the use of legal language in legitimizing rhetoric has markedly waned. From a neoclassical realist perspective, this pattern reflects both an international environment in which post-1945 legal and normative constraints on the use of force are under growing strain, as well as domestic perceptions that privilege transactional conceptions of interest and hierarchy over rule-based justifications. To assess this claim, the paper examines Trump 2.0 public statements and the 2025 National Security Strategy, with particular attention to the administration’s stance on Russian aggression in Ukraine and its approach to the Maduro regime in Venezuela. The paper contributes to neoclassical realist research on the evolution of US foreign and security policy and to broader debates on the liberal international order. It shows how shifts in systemic pressures and domestic foreign policy ideology are reflected in the language through which US leaders legitimate or discount international legal constraints, and what this implies for the future of rule-based order under Trump 2.0 and beyond.