Theatres of Justification: On the Aesthetics of the Call to Arms Speech

Introduction

Cultural memory has a peculiar taste. The further a war speech drifts into the past, the more beautiful it sounds. The ancient denunciations of enemies, the consecrated cadences of Gettysburg, the rolling sonorities of wartime London. These are framed as literature, anthologised as if they were plays. Yet when the speeches are fresh, when their consequences drip with blood, they are exiled from art. A presidential ultimatum is treated as policy, an invasion address as propaganda. We grant poetics to the ancients but deny it to ourselves. This is not criticism but squeamishness.

And yet it may be that the aesthetic charge is strongest precisely when the speech is still lethal. At that moment, cadence and metaphor are not decoration; they are machinery: an overture of grievance, a crescendo of urgency, a climactic metaphor. This is theatre, not briefing. Bush announcing a 48-hour deadline on Iraq in 2003 was not delivering intelligence; he was staging a countdown. Putin, two decades later, standing beneath chandeliers to declare a “special military operation,” was not merely describing events; he was enacting inevitability. Both were stepping into a genre older than democracy itself.

We comfort ourselves by insisting on difference. One speech was framed as the defence of freedom, the other as the defence of empire. One lied about hidden weapons, the other of hidden Nazis. But if the labels diverge, the structure converges. Each bends time so that hesitation itself feels like betrayal. Each elevates the speaker into the embodiment of destiny. The accents are different, the costumes local, yet the choreography is almost indistinguishable.

The pattern is reliable, even ritualistic. First comes the overture: a catalogue of injuries and a hymn to shared values. Then the rising tension: distant dangers shuffle closer, the enemy seems already inside the house. At the climax, a metaphor detonates — mushroom cloud, genocide, apocalypse — that seals inevitability. Finally the coda: a benediction of history, providence or civilisation. The curtain falls. War begins.

This is not a matter of plagiarism but of recurrence. The call to arms is a genre. Its grammar is stable because of its efficiency. Fear can be sculpted into cadence. Duty can be staged as destiny. A speech of this kind does not merely persuade; it performs, and in performing, it makes action appear as the only possible conclusion.

Once the form is exposed, the question changes. Instead of debating whether a particular war was justified, one begins to ask how the speech made justification unnecessary. How was inevitability staged? Why does catastrophe so often arrive as a cloud on the horizon, or as a disease creeping through the body politic? Why does the leader’s body, framed by flags, seated in gilded halls, lit like an icon, continue to operate as proof of authority? These are not questions of geopolitics. They are questions of stagecraft.

To read such speeches as artworks is not to praise them but to diminish them. Once moved from the lectern into the seminar room or gallery, they lose their aura. They become scripts: repeatable, interruptible, parodiable. The ultimatum resembles a melodramatic countdown. The invasion declaration resembles the overture of an opera. They can be replayed and annotated rather than obeyed. Their grandeur reveals itself as genre, their inevitability as cliché.

The task of the chapters that follow is therefore not moral judgment but formal analysis. The speeches of Bush and Putin set against the wars of Iraq and Ukraine, the most publicised conflicts of the century, will be read not as isolated events but as twin variations on the same genre. Through their staging of fear, their iconography of enemies, their compressed timelines, and their performances of authority, they expose themselves as continuations of a tradition that stretches from the ancient forum to the global screen. The paradox is sharp: the call to arms must be heard as art in order for its seductions to be resisted.

History of Political Speech as Art

In antiquity, rhetoric was a liberal art and its exemplary practitioners were canonised alongside poets and historians. Figures such as Pericles, Demosthenes and Cicero were not merely persuasive politicians but artists whose speeches were judged for stylistic and ethical value as well as efficacy. Pericles’ Funeral Oration, preserved by Thucydides, articulates Athenian civic ideals in rhythms that secured its place next to tragedy and epic. Demosthenes’ Philippics and Cicero’s orations similarly fused civic courage with stylistic mastery, and rhetorical pedagogy treated their speeches as models to be imitated and memorised, much like copying master paintings. The five canons of rhetoric: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio codified oratory into a structured art, where invention and style paralleled composition and form in the visual arts¹.

The Renaissance was marked by a deliberate return to this rhetorical legacy. Humanists revered Cicero not only as a statesman but as a model of stylistic perfection, and collections of his works proliferated in manuscript and print². Rhetoric was placed at the heart of the studia humanitatis, ensuring that eloquence was regarded as an indispensable civic art. The blending of oratory with other cultural practices was evident in the way rhetorical precepts informed both visual representation and political performance. Renaissance political life was deeply “theatrical”, with gesture, speech and imagery combining to persuade audiences in courts and assemblies³. From the Renaissance onwards, this tradition extended into modernity: in revolutionary France, Mirabeau’s speeches were recorded and circulated as emblems of the new order, while in the United States Lincoln’s addresses were crafted with classical concision and quickly entered the literary canon. With radio and film, Churchill’s wartime speeches projected this inheritance to mass audiences, perhaps for the last time that political oratory was widely acknowledged as both pragmatic and aesthetic.

Against this background, the issue of authorship constitutes a critical divergence between classical and contemporary understandings of political speech as art. In antiquity, orators like Cicero and Demosthenes wrote, revised and delivered their own speeches; authorship was inseparable from performance, and authenticity was judged by the coherence between text, ethos and delivery⁴. In modern contexts, however, the professionalisation of speechwriting in the twentieth century fundamentally altered perceptions of oratorical authorship⁵. Political leaders now delegate the production of texts to teams of advisers, who craft messages tailored to specific audiences and media formats. The leader remains the performer but not always the author, so the artistic labour that once appeared singular is now dispersed across institutional processes. This diffusion of authorship has contributed to a cultural suspicion toward contemporary oratory. Whereas a Ciceronian speech bore the stamp of one individual’s intellectual and stylistic labour, a modern presidential address is often perceived as the outcome of bureaucratic procedures and public relations strategies. Even when a speech achieves rhetorical brilliance, as in the case of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, the credit is frequently shared with, or even shifted to, the speechwriter, complicating its entry into the canon of singular artistic works⁶.

From antiquity to today, oratory has also been understood as an embodied act, where delivery and staging are as decisive as the words themselves. Classical theorists like Cicero and Quintilian insisted that delivery (actio) was a decisive component of rhetorical effectiveness, comparable to the execution of brushstrokes in painting or the modulation of voice in music⁷. Gesture, tone and rhythm transform the written text into a living performance. In modern politics, this performative dimension has expanded into large-scale staging that often borders on theatre. Scholars of political aesthetics have drawn attention to the way state rituals and mass spectacles employ similar strategies to avant-garde performance art, relying on “staging, repetition and collective affect”⁸. Contemporary political speeches, whether delivered in parliamentary chambers, on radio or before mass rallies, are rarely limited to the spoken word. They are embedded in choreographies of movement, camera framing and media circulation that together heighten their impact. The speech, with its carefully crafted rhetoric and delivery, complements other symbolic practices of the modern state, rituals, ceremonies and visual displays, that together create a total aesthetic-political environment. Unlike in antiquity, where oratory itself could claim the dignity of a singular art, in the modern age it often functions as one component within a broader orchestration of political aesthetics.

These shifts in authorship and performance contribute to the changing cultural valuation of political speech. Ancient speeches like those of Cicero or Pericles are canonised as art, while many modern speeches are dismissed as ephemeral politics. Part of the explanation lies in historical distance: the reception of texts changes once their immediate political context recedes, and they can then be reinterpreted as works of literature embodying “universal” themes⁹. Pericles’ Funeral Oration or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, once rooted in particular crises, are now read as timeless reflections on democracy, sacrifice and human dignity. Another factor is educational canonisation. For centuries, rhetorical training in Europe centred on the study and imitation of classical speeches, ensuring their status as exemplary works of art. Modern speeches, by contrast, are rarely integrated into curricula of literature or art history; they are more often studied in political science or communication departments, reinforcing the division between art and politics¹⁰. Authorship resurfaces at this point: the collaborative production of contemporary speeches sits uneasily with modern expectations of original, singular art, and this tension further contributes to their exclusion from the art canon. The challenge, therefore, is to reconceptualise modern political oratory as part of a broader history of art and performance. By acknowledging its aesthetic structures, its performative strategies and its collaborative authorship, we may recover for political speech a place within the field of art, albeit under transformed conditions.

Theoretical and Methodological Framework

The conceptual apparatus through which political speech can be understood as an art form requires a careful weaving of rhetorical theory, modern linguistics, critical discourse analysis and art theory. Each of these traditions provides categories, methods and insights that, when placed in dialogue, illuminate the complexity of political oratory and allow us to situate it at the nexus of persuasion, ideology, and aesthetics.

Classical rhetoric offers the indispensable foundation for any study of political oratory. Aristotle’s Rhetoric established the triadic appeals of ethos, pathos and logos as the central modes of persuasion: ethos as the credibility of the speaker, pathos as the mobilisation of emotions, and logos as the appeal to rational argument¹¹, complemented by kairos (the opportune moment) and the system of stasis (the contested points in a debate)¹². In contemporary war speeches, these appeals remain visible in the crafted persona of the leader, the mobilisation of pride, fear or grief, the marshalling of facts and causal claims, and the seizing of a “historic” moment.

Cicero and Quintilian further expanded this tradition by highlighting the performative and ethical dimensions of rhetoric. Cicero’s insistence that the orator must embody wisdom and civic virtue elevates political speech beyond mere persuasion, while Quintilian’s conception of the orator as “a good man speaking well” links rhetoric with moral responsibility¹³. These classical insights anticipate modern debates about authorship, responsibility and spectatorship in political communication.

While classical rhetoric provides categories of analysis, modern linguistics, and particularly Michael Halliday’s systemic-functional model, offers a way of understanding political speech as a form of social action. For Halliday, language is a social semiotic, a system of choices through which speakers construct meaning in specific contexts¹⁴. Every utterance performs three metafunctions: the ideational (representing experience and knowledge), the interpersonal (enacting social relations) and the textual (organising discourse coherently).

In political speech these metafunctions become acutely visible: the ideational function in representations of conflicts and threats, the interpersonal in relations of solidarity, authority and distance, and the textual in the patterned ordering of arguments through devices such as anaphora, antithesis or parallelism. Halliday’s model underscores that such speeches are not neutral descriptions but interventions in social relations. As Oddo shows for George W. Bush, lexical choices and grammatical structures systematically align audiences with the speaker while delegitimising adversaries, for instance by obscuring agency (“mistakes were made”) or foregrounding it (“they attacked us”)¹⁵.

Building on Halliday, critical discourse analysis (CDA) links linguistic detail to social structures, asking how discourse reproduces power, ideology and dominance. Ruth Wodak’s “discourse-historical approach” situates political texts within their trajectories, showing how strategies are recontextualised across time and institutions as deployable tools of governance.¹⁶ Oddo terms the circulation of such texts “intertextual amplification”: presidential discourse is reiterated across press conferences, news outlets and expert commentary so that its framing of events accumulates and sediments in public culture¹⁷.

Performance studies insist that a speech is an embodied event rather than a neutral text; presence, gesture and delivery co-create meaning with spectators¹⁸. Bush’s “axis of evil” or Putin’s “denazification” can thus be read as elements of a political Gesamtkunstwerk, where text, staging and circulation form an aesthetic ensemble. Authorship is distributed yet attributed to a singular figure, echoing Barthes’s “death of the author”, while spectatorship remains active: audiences’ uptake is necessary for legitimacy and effect¹⁹.

The methodological framework of this study combines comparative discourse analysis (CDA) with an art-theoretical reading of political speech. The purpose is to analyse the rhetorical strategies through which political leaders legitimate war, mobilise populations and construct collective identities, while also treating their speeches as crafted textual artefacts whose form and performance can be read through the lenses of authorship, performance, and spectatorship. To analyse them merely as tools of domination risks missing their aesthetic dimension.

The central methodological move of this study is to adopt a comparative lens between two corpora: George W. Bush’s speeches in the months leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq (September 2002–March 2003), and Vladimir Putin’s speeches across 2014–2022, especially those marking the annexation of Crimea and the escalation of the war in Ukraine²⁰. These corpora have been chosen not on the basis of presumed influence or derivation but because both represent paradigmatic moments of contemporary war legitimation rhetoric. In both cases, the head of state addressed a wide public, domestic and international, at moments of heightened geopolitical crisis.

The Bush corpus centres on speeches explicitly designed to prepare domestic and international audiences for military action: his address to the United Nations General Assembly (12 September 2002), the 2003 State of the Union address (28 January 2003), and his public statement on 17 March 2003 announcing the ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. Putin’s corpus includes speeches that defined Russia’s justification for military action: his address on Crimea (18 March 2014), his speech at the Federal Assembly in March 2018, and his televised address on 24 February 2022 announcing the “special military operation” in Ukraine.

The methodological backbone of the analysis is a thematic coding framework, combining deductive categories derived from prior scholarship with inductive categories identified during close reading. The codes allow for systematic comparison across the two corpora and are as follows:

Fear: lexical items and figurative constructions that stage impending harm or catastrophe, including direct references to threat, danger, annihilation and vulnerability, as well as narrative sequences that build a sense of looming disaster.

Exclusion: markers that draw boundaries between an in-group and an out-group, whether through explicit naming of enemies or more implicit signals of belonging and non-belonging (for example, “our people”, “our values”, “they”, “those states”).

Modality: verbs, adverbs and other expressions that encode degrees of certainty, necessity, obligation or possibility. Coding tracks the distribution and strength of modal forms such as “must”, “will”, “cannot”, “may”, and how they position war as optional, likely, or inevitable.

Proximization: expressions that present distant events or actors as increasingly close in space, time or values. This includes language that collapses geographical distance, compresses timelines of action, or frames threats as assaults on “our way of life”, thereby making extraordinary measures appear necessary.

Metaphor: figurative mappings that frame conflict and enemies through other domains, such as disease, cleansing, pollution, machinery, natural disaster or architecture. Coding notes the main metaphorical fields and how consistently they structure the representation of threat and response.

Concealment: absences, presuppositions and silences around key actors, causes or evidence. Coding attends to what is left implicit or omitted, including ellipses and backgrounded information, on the assumption that such gaps shape interpretation as much as overt declarations.

The methodological orientation of this study integrates linguistic precision with aesthetic sensitivity. Comparative CDA provides the rigour for identifying recurrent rhetorical strategies, while the art-theoretical lens allows us to appreciate the form, rhythm, and performative dimension of political speech. In this way, the methodology opens a space for what might be termed a comparative aesthetics of political speech. By treating speeches as both political interventions and cultural artefacts, the analysis foregrounds the dual nature of war rhetoric: simultaneously instrumental and aesthetic, immediate and enduring.

Analysis

Fear as Universal Artistic Device

As outlined in the framework above, fear in political rhetoric is not merely content but form. What matters is less the specific danger named than the way it is staged as looming, inescapable and shared. The analysis below shows how Bush and Putin mobilise such fear structures in formally parallel ways.

Fear Appeals in Bush’s Iraq War Speeches

Bush’s discourse between 2001 and 2003 demonstrates systematic deployment of fear appeals. In the 2002 State of the Union Address, he introduces the “axis of evil” (Iraq, Iran, North Korea) as nations arming to “threaten the peace of the world.” The term “axis” geometrically frames them as aligned forces, collapsing geographical distance into a single, looming threat.

Lexical clusters of fear recur:

Imminence: “grave and growing danger,” “time is not on our side.”

Catastrophe: “a day of horror like none we have ever known.”

Family and community: “we must not leave our children to face this threat.”

Bush’s October 7, 2002 Cincinnati speech amplifies this. Saddam Hussein is described as a man who “must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons.” The piling of nouns (“poisons… diseases… gases… atomic weapons”) produces cumulative fear, a catalogue of terrors akin to the grotesque enumerations in Goya’s Disasters of War.

Bush’s March 17, 2003 ultimatum speech to Saddam reiterates the same fear structure: “The danger is clear: using chemical, biological, or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfil their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people.” Here fear is globalised: Iraq and terrorists fuse into a single, transnational threat. The aesthetic device is collage, stitching together disparate dangers into a singular fearful image.

Fear Appeals in Putin’s Ukraine War Speeches

Putin’s 24 February 2022 declaration of the “special military operation” mirrors this structure. Fear is staged as existential: “For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation.” NATO expansion is framed as encirclement: “Step by step, they have been creating an anti-Russia right on our borders.”

Lexical clusters of fear include:

Existential collapse: “threat to our very existence.”

Historical apocalypse: “the complete destruction of our homeland.”

Family/community: “we cannot stand by and watch our brothers in Donbass be strangled.”

In a speech on September 30, 2022 (annexation of four Ukrainian regions), Putin explicitly mobilises fear of cultural annihilation: “They want to destroy our culture and cancel our history.” This expands the locus of fear from physical destruction to cultural death, what Jan Assmann calls cultural memory genocide.

Comparative Table

Side-by-Side Close Reading of Climactic Fear Appeals

Metaphorical condensation

Bush: The metaphor “smoking gun” collides with “mushroom cloud.” The former is a cliché of criminal evidence; the latter is an apocalyptic image of nuclear annihilation. By fusing the two, Bush leaps from courtroom logic (proof, guilt) to catastrophic imagination (nuclear holocaust).

Putin: The central metaphor is “genocide.” It transposes a legally defined atrocity into the present tense, presenting Russia’s intervention as rescue. The final phrase, “a worse peril than what is happening now,” introduces an open-ended escalation: the unspoken catastrophe exceeds the already intolerable.

Both passages deploy metaphor as aesthetic scaffolding²¹: Bush’s metaphors collapse law and apocalypse, Putin’s collapse humanitarian rescue and existential defence.

Syntax and cadence

Bush: The syntax is taut, with a single long sentence broken by a dash—“the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” The dash dramatizes hesitation and suspense, mimicking the imminence of explosion. The rhythm is rising, culminating in the heavy consonants of “mushroom cloud.”

Putin: The passage unfolds in parataxis: clauses strung together with “and” (“humiliation and genocide… threats created for us and from a worse peril”). This accumulative rhythm builds weight, a piling up of grievances. The cadence lands on “worse peril,” vague but absolute, a gesture toward infinite escalation.

Both adopt climactic syntax: Bush uses the dash to dramatise imminence, Putin uses parataxis to accumulate inevitability.

Emotional register

Bush: Fear is tied to delay: the peril comes if America “waits.” The affect is urgency. The implied choice: act now, or face nuclear death.

Putin: Fear is tied to continuity: the Donbass people have faced “eight years” of suffering, and now the peril escalates. The affect is inevitability. The implied choice: act now, or face genocide and worse.

In both cases, fear culminates in the sense that delay is intolerable: a move explored more fully in proximization below. Despite different idioms (Bush’s courtroom/apocalyptic hybrid, Putin’s humanitarian/existential amalgam) both leaders rely on fear as a universal artistic device. The dramaturgy is parallel:

Build anticipation through narrative (weapons inspections; NATO expansion).

Insert a climactic metaphor (mushroom cloud; genocide).

Land on inevitability (we cannot wait; we must defend ourselves).

Enemy Iconography

Enemy construction is central to both rhetoric and art. In rhetorical terms, ethos and pathos are crucial in positioning the adversary as morally corrupt and dangerous²². Modern discourse analysis speaks of “negative other-presentation” as a systematic feature of war rhetoric, legitimising exclusion and violence²³. John Oddo shows how Bush’s “axis of evil” discourse condenses multiple polities into a singular enemy, turning diffuse threats into a coherent figure of evil²⁴, while Nikos Aspriadis argues that Putin’s “denazification” label “functions as intertextual shorthand, activating deep cultural trauma and legitimising violence”²⁵. Medieval and modern propaganda images suffice as analogy: enemies appear with distorted physiognomy or as vermin. Political speech works similarly with verbal clichés that condense hostility into recognisable motifs.

Bush: Terrorist and the “Axis of Evil”

Bush’s speeches in 2002–03 frame the enemy primarily as the terrorist, synecdochically extended to Iraq. In Cincinnati (7 Oct. 2002), Bush asserts: “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.” Here the enemy is diffuse, spectral, and omnipresent: an “invisible” terrorist could deliver catastrophe without trace.

In the 2002 State of the Union, Bush’s “axis of evil” passage creates a geometrical metaphor: “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world”. The phrase fuses state and non-state enemies, creating an axis: an image of alignment, conspiracy, and symmetry.

Putin: The Nazi and “Anti-Russia”

Putin’s February 24, 2022 address casts Ukraine’s government as Nazi: “The purpose of this operation is… to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine”. The Nazi epithet operates as intertextual shorthand, collapsing present-day Ukraine into the cultural trauma of the Great Patriotic War. Later in the speech, Putin appeals to the memory of “fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers [who] did not fight the Nazi occupiers… to allow today’s neo-Nazis to seize power in Ukraine” .

In September 2022, he elaborated: “They want to destroy our culture and cancel our history” . The enemy is not only political but civilisational, a Nazi threat combined with cultural erasure.

Close Reading: “Axis of Evil” vs. “Neo-Nazis in Ukraine”

Bush: The phrase “axis of evil” condenses Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and terrorism into a singular enemy. The geometry of “axis” implies a coherent alignment, while “evil” elevates the enemy to metaphysical status. Syntax is brief, declarative, final, like a verdict. The cadence is hard and memorable, designed to circulate as slogan.

Putin: The appeal to lineage (fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers) invokes intergenerational memory of the Great Patriotic War. The enemy is figured as “neo-Nazis,” a direct continuity with WWII. Syntax is expansive and paratactic, building lineage into inevitability. The cadence culminates in repetition: Nazi → occupiers → neo-Nazis.

Both transform political adversaries into iconographic enemies: Bush’s terrorists become absolute “evil”; Putin’s Ukrainians become Nazis. Each functions as a motif easily recognisable and emotionally charged, like repeated emblems in a series of paintings.

In both corpora, enemy construction operates through condensation and intertextual shorthand. Bush fuses disparate states and non-state actors into an “axis of evil”; Putin folds present-day Ukrainians into the Nazi template, turning current conflict into a replay of WWII.

Ethos as Performance of Authority

Ethos, understood here not only as character but as performed authority, is staged through voice, costume and setting as much as through argument.

Bush: Ethos of the Decisive Commander

Bush’s Ultimatum Speech (17 March 2003) exemplifies ethos as decisive command. Speaking from the White House, he declared:

“Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing.”

Here, Bush’s ethos is constructed by modal certainty (“must leave”), temporal compression (“48 hours”), and sovereign control (“a time of our choosing”). The visual staging reinforced this authority: a solemn, direct-to-camera address in the intimacy of the Oval Office, stripped of spectacle but saturated with presidential gravitas.

The performance was followed weeks later by the more spectacular “Mission Accomplished” carrier speech (1 May 2003), where Bush’s ethos shifted from commander to victorious general. But the ultimatum already staged ethos as an act of temporal sovereignty: Bush controlled not only the nation’s military apparatus but the very countdown of history.

Putin: Ethos of the Sovereign Guardian

Putin’s Invasion Address (24 February 2022) stages ethos as historical guardianship. Framed by Russian flags in a gilded Kremlin hall, he asserted:

“For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation.”

The ethos is prophetic rather than procedural. Putin speaks as custodian of an eternal Russia, charged with protecting both territory and memory. The spatial staging (imperial décor, symmetrical composition) projects timeless sovereignty. Unlike Bush’s compressed ultimatum, Putin stretches time, binding the invasion to “a thousand-year history” and the sacrifices of ancestors.

Comparative Close Reading

Bush, Ultimatum (17 Mar. 2003): authority performed as immediate executor of war. Temporal urgency dominates: the 48-hour deadline creates a dramatic countdown. Ethos = commander-in-chief.

Putin, Invasion (24 Feb. 2022): authority performed as guardian of destiny. Temporal expansiveness dominates: the war is tied to centuries of history. Ethos = sovereign patriarch.

Temporal framing: Bush compresses time → imminent action. Putin expands time → historical inevitability.

Spatial staging: Bush in the Oval Office → civic solemnity. Putin in Kremlin halls → imperial grandeur.

Ethos in war rhetoric is not static character but performance. Bush’s ultimatum stages authority as martial decisiveness; Putin’s invasion stages authority as sovereign continuity. Both enact aesthetic self-fashioning: Bush as commander, Putin as patriarch. Authority is not only argued but staged, through temporality, space, costume, and voice, making political speech a work of performance art.

Metaphors as Aesthetic Scaffolding

As Lakoff and Johnson argue, metaphors structure perception rather than merely decorating it. In war rhetoric they become aesthetic scaffolds, turning abstract conflicts into images of threat, purity or contagion.

Bush: Metaphors of the Ticking Bomb and Purification

In his Ultimatum Speech (17 Mar. 2003), Bush constructs Iraq as a “ticking bomb” that must be defused. He states:

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

The metaphor of concealment creates an image of shadows and hidden danger. The enemy is not visible but lurking, which amplifies fear and justifies pre-emptive strike. The “most lethal weapons ever devised” are framed as technological monstrosities, a grotesque embodiment of evil ingenuity.

Bush also invokes purification imagery: “The United States of America has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security”. Here, “assuring” functions as purification: America cleanses itself of contamination by removing the source of danger. The ultimatum operates as a ritual purge, casting war as the hygienic solution to political infection.

Putin: Metaphors of Infection and Cleansing

Putin’s Invasion Speech (24 Feb. 2022) likewise rests on metaphors of disease and purification. He describes Ukraine as infected with Nazism:

“We will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine.”

The metaphor of “denazification” operates as medical intervention. Ukraine is not presented as a sovereign state but as a diseased body requiring surgery. Russia is positioned as the doctor cleansing infection, a metaphor resonant with Soviet memory of the Great Patriotic War.

Putin also frames Russia as a besieged fortress: “For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation.” The fortress metaphor casts the West as an encircling aggressor, while Russia stands as the walled citadel of survival. The architectural imagery of walls, gates, and thresholds creates a powerful sense of spatial defence, much like the iconography of medieval fortresses in Russian culture.

Comparative Analysis

Bush: Iraq is a ticking bomb, a contaminated shadow that must be cleansed by surgical strike.

Putin: Ukraine is a diseased body, infected with Nazism, to be cleansed through denazification.

Both leaders frame war as purification. For Bush, Iraq is a concealed, ticking bomb to be surgically removed; for Putin, Ukraine is a diseased body to be cleansed through “denazification”. In each case, political conflict is transformed into a hygienic ritual, aligning the speeches with older allegories of cleansing and plague.

These metaphors anchor the speeches’ broader dramaturgy of distance and urgency, which proximization theory helps clarify.

Proximization as Stage Design

Proximization theory describes how political rhetoric brings distant threats “closer” in space, time and values to legitimise exceptional measures. Read aesthetically, proximization operates like stage design: leaders choreograph the enemy’s approach until it seems to stand at the audience’s door.

Bush: Countdown in the Civic Chamber

In his Ultimatum Speech (17 Mar. 2003), Bush stages Iraq as an imminent danger not only to American troops but to American civilians. He declares:

“Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing.”

The temporal proximization is absolute: the countdown of “48 hours” constructs war as inevitable within two days. The audience is made to feel the ticking clock as if it were on their own wall.

Bush further intensifies spatial proximization by collapsing the distance between Iraq and the United States:

“Saddam Hussein has a history of reckless aggression and a deep hatred of America. He has aided, trained, and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda.”

By associating Iraq with al Qaeda, the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks, Bush brings Baghdad into New York and Washington. The Oval Office staging reinforces this: a calm domestic setting suddenly haunted by an invisible but imminent threat. The visual proximity of the President speaking directly to citizens in their living rooms completes the dramaturgy of the enemy already at the door.

Putin: Fortress Besieged

Putin’s Invasion Speech (24 Feb. 2022) enacts proximization by presenting Ukraine not as a neighbour but as a platform of invasion. He states:

“The leading NATO countries are supporting the far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine. They will inevitably try to bring war to our land.”

Here, spatial proximization operates through the metaphor of encirclement: NATO is already “at our borders,” Ukraine is “on our doorstep.” The threat is choreographed as standing just outside the gate, waiting to break through.

Putin also frames temporal proximization as existential:

“For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation.”

The time horizon is compressed into a “life or death” present. Unlike Bush’s precise countdown, Putin’s proximization is indefinite but total: history itself is under siege, the threat is both immediate and eternal.

The stage design reinforces this reading. Putin speaks from a gilded Kremlin hall, flanked by flags, beneath chandeliers. The grandeur makes the threat appear immense; the Kremlin itself becomes a fortress theatre, with Putin as its defender.

Comparative Analysis

Temporal framing: Bush staged authority through countdown; Putin through historical continuity. Two variants of the temporal manoeuvre described in proximization.

Spatial staging: Bush collapses Iraq into the American homeland by linking it with al Qaeda. Putin imagines NATO’s armies standing at the Russian gate.

Stage design: Bush’s Oval Office: intimate, domestic, civic. Putin’s Kremlin hall: imperial, theatrical, monumental. Each space serves as scenography: Bush makes the threat walk into the living room; Putin makes it hammer at the fortress walls.

Bush’s countdown in the Oval Office and Putin’s encirclement in the Kremlin hall are two scenographic variants of the same manoeuvre: bringing threat into the frame so that war appears as the only protective response.

Concealment as Negative Space in the Artwork

If negative space in visual art gives shape to the image, rhetorical concealment gives shape to political threat. CDA has long noted that silences and omissions structure meaning as powerfully as explicit statements.

Bush: Hidden Weapons as Dark Space

Bush’s Ultimatum Speech (17 Mar. 2003) hinges on the concealment of weapons of mass destruction:

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

The verb “conceal” makes absence itself into evidence. By insisting on what cannot be seen, Bush produces a negative space that is rhetorically filled by audience imagination. The hidden WMDs become a dark void surrounding the speech, a negative space that justifies pre-emptive action.

The Oval Office setting underscores this: a room lit with clarity and authority, but haunted by shadows beyond the camera frame. Just as a Caravaggio painting dramatises meaning through chiaroscuro, Bush’s rhetoric works by projecting terror into the unseen, the off-stage, the unlit.

Putin: Hidden Nazis and Western Plots

Putin’s Invasion Speech (24 Feb. 2022) similarly relies on absence and concealment. He declares:

“Their entire policy is built on lies, concealment, and coercion.”

Here, the concealment is projected onto the West and the Ukrainian government. Putin insists that behind the façade of democracy lies a hidden cabal of “neo-Nazis” and Western manipulators. Unlike Bush, who locates concealment in hidden weapons, Putin locates it in hidden identities: enemies disguised as ordinary Ukrainians or Western allies.

This rhetorical concealment mobilises paranoia: what is invisible becomes omnipresent. Just as negative space in an artwork makes the figure stand out, the invisible “Nazi” makes Putin’s call to “denazify” seem inevitable, as though the unseen void must be purged to restore clarity.

Comparative Analysis

Bush: concealment = hidden weapons → absence of evidence becomes evidence.

Putin: concealment = hidden Nazis/plots → absence of visible enemies becomes proof of their ubiquity.

Both speeches show how concealment operates aesthetically, producing a negative space of fear. In both cases, unseen enemies: hidden weapons, hidden Nazis become the dark void that frames the call to arms.

Bush/Iraq and Putin/Ukraine as Works in the Same Genre: The Call to Arms Speech

Bush’s ultimatum and Putin’s invasion address were not spontaneous performances but carefully staged entries into a familiar rhetorical tradition: the Call to Arms Speech. Mikhail Bakhtin describes “speech genres” as historically stable forms, shaped by repetition and social convention: “Each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of utterances”²⁶. John Frow adds that genres create “horizons of expectation”, binding speakers and audiences into shared frameworks for recognition²⁷. To speak a call to arms is therefore to step into a pre-structured role: the leader is heard in the echo of Cicero denouncing Catiline, Elizabeth I at Tilbury, Lincoln at Gettysburg, Churchill promising “blood, toil, tears and sweat”.

As a genre, the call to arms functions simultaneously as social ritual and aesthetic form. Drawing on speech act theory and Judith Butler’s account of performativity, we can understand such speeches as utterances that do not simply describe a shift from peace to war but help bring that shift into being²⁸. They mark the threshold between normal governance and emergency, staging a moment in which hesitation is framed as betrayal. Bush’s 48-hour ultimatum did not merely announce the possibility of war; it enacted the temporal point at which war would begin. Putin’s invasion address likewise framed the attack on Ukraine as the fulfilment of a preordained national destiny rather than one policy choice among others.

Both speeches thus occupy a recognisable genre position. They inherit a grammar of fear, enemy construction, compressed time and elevated ethos that has accrued across centuries. The comparative analysis above traced how these elements operate in each corpus; here they can be seen as the core conventions of the Call to Arms Speech, reactivated in different idioms but with striking structural continuity.

Walter Benjamin’s account of the “aestheticisation of politics” helps explain why calls to arms are so carefully staged²⁹. They translate organised violence into spectacle, arranging symbols, images and cadences into an artwork of legitimacy. Jacques Rancière’s notion of the “distribution of the sensible” clarifies what is at stake in that staging: political aesthetics decides which fears, bodies and futures can be rendered visible and audible, and which are pushed to the margins³⁰.

Bush’s ultimatum and Putin’s invasion address are exemplary in this sense. Each is composed for cameras as much as for the immediate audience, designed to enter an archive of images that stand in for the war itself. The oval framing of Bush at his desk and the gilded Kremlin hall around Putin are not neutral backdrops but parts of the aesthetic apparatus that turn threat into a scene, fear into an organised performance to be watched, shared and remembered. The speeches operate as discrete works within a wider aesthetic-political machinery: they condense the wars they inaugurate into a single, repeatable image of resolve.

Bush’s ultimatum condenses the grammar traced above: fear of an invisible ticking bomb, a monstrous enemy figure, an ethos of decisive command, a precise countdown and an insistence on concealed WMDs as negative space.

Putin’s address replays the same grammar with different idioms: fear of Nazi infection, a civilisational enemy supported by NATO, a patriarchal ethos staged in imperial décor, existential temporality and unseen conspiracies that must be purged.

Placed side by side, Bush and Putin’s Calls to Arms reveal genre isomorphism — identical scaffolding beneath cultural difference:

The Call to Arms Speech can be mapped onto operatic form:

Overture: Invocation of history, values, and moral stakes.

Rising action: Proximization, enemy encroaches.

Climax: Ultimatum/declaration — words that cross into action.

Coda: Appeal to destiny, divine sanction, or civilisational continuity.

By naming Bush and Putin’s addresses as Call to Arms Speeches, we see that:

They are ritualised acts, marking the liminal moment when words tip into violence.

They aestheticise politics as spectacle, transforming absence (hidden WMDs, hidden Nazis) into palpable presence for global consumption.

They are structurally identical, showing that the genre transcends ideology: liberal democracy and authoritarianism alike use the same aesthetic grammar.

They reproduce cultural mythologies, whether American manifest destiny or Russian fortress mentality.

Thus, the Call to Arms Speech is not accidental rhetoric but a transhistorical genre of political art. It is recognisable across antiquity, modernity, and contemporary crises. Bush and Putin’s speeches are not simply moments of politics but entries in a gallery of aesthetic forms — variations of the same work, the art of calling a nation to arms.

Reframing Political Speech

To treat Bush’s 2002 State of the Union as mere policy, or his 48-hour ultimatum as mere geopolitics, is wilfully naïve. The State of the Union was theatre: the ritual chamber, the ovations, the cadence of revelation. The ultimatum was tragedy: the compressed stasis point, the countdown to war, the language of inevitability (“President Says Saddam Hussein Must Leave Iraq within 48 Hours”). The Oval Office war announcement was liturgy: the hushed tones of midnight, the framing of invasion as deliverance, the consecration of violence as necessary and just (“President Bush Announces Military Strikes”). All three were poetics: curated metaphors, narratological arcs, careful distribution of ethos, pathos and logos.

Contemporary art has already refused this separation. The gallery and the theatre have been staging political texts for decades: verbatim readings, parliamentary re-enactments, leaked-report recitals, solemn choral renderings of bureaucratic memoranda. Once Bush’s ultimatum is lifted from the lectern and spoken by an actor under white light, the authorial map splits. The line of credit no longer runs smoothly from speechwriter to president to state archive. It now threads through director, performer and audience, redistributing responsibility and reframing value. What is the “work” at that point? A text by a president? A scenario by a writer? A score interpreted by performers? Or the event itself: the charged interval in which a public hears, again, words that acted on the world when first spoken? In this traffic between chamber and black box, authorship becomes plural and unstable. It becomes closer to performance art than to literature: durational, contingent, indexical.

The state is the total work; the speech is one of its operative parts. Like a leitmotif in a long symphony, the call to arms binds institutions, media, uniforms, funerals, contracts and coffins into a single aesthetic-political apparatus. Acknowledging the speech within the state’s aesthetic apparatus is not endorsement but analysis. Burke’s reminder is chilling and useful here: the sublime is born from terror and danger, which produce a “delightful horror” when contemplated at a safe remove³¹. War oratory harnesses precisely this structure: it aestheticises peril to metabolise fear into purpose. The ovation that punctuates a call to arms, the chant that lifts it, the cresting cadences, these are not technical footnotes. They are the rhythm of mobilisation.

What emerges here is not identity of content but recurrence of form. Across wars and centuries, the grammar of the call to arms proves remarkably stable: the declaration of urgency, the elevation of citizens into guardians of destiny, the crystallisation of an enemy, the sanctification of risk, and the promise of eventual closure. The names differ (“terror,” “tyranny,” “Nazism”) but the formal scaffolding persists. The speech is never merely its content; it is a choreography of fear, duty and hope that operates with ritual precision.

Insisting on this recurrence is not cynicism. It is a tool for analysis and pedagogy. If Bush and Putin stand within a long continuum, then our curricula should change. We should read the 2002 State of the Union, the 2003 ultimatum and war announcement, and the 2014 annexation speech alongside Demosthenes and Cicero, not as aberrant propaganda but as contemporary instances of an enduring art. We should annotate their metaphors with Charteris-Black, their proximization with Cap, their narrative causality with classical dispositio. We should treat their orations as texts that do things, as speech acts whose artistry is inseparable from their efficacy. Our task is not to homogenise historical responsibility but to recognise the grammar that enables it to travel.

What does contemporary art contribute here, beyond illustrative zeal? It returns risk and ambiguity to the reception of political speech. In a gallery, the applause track is cut. The camera angle is gone. The oath-taking architecture has been stripped, the flag folded out of view. In this spare staging, the address speaks again, but now under the conditions of art: repeatable, examinable, vulnerable to interruption. Performance makes the authorship problem visible. The presidential “I” was never singular; it was a committee of ghosts—speechwriter, pollster, strategist, consultant—coalescing in one voice. On a stage, that composite authorship becomes legible, then contestable. The audience is no longer only subject to the spell; it can assess the technique. This is not aesthetic absolution. It is the beginning of accountability.

Such reframing matters most where harm is current. It is easier to admire the concision of the Gettysburg Address because the bodies are remote. The challenge is to keep our aesthetic attention awake when bodies are not yet cold, or when they are still being made. The point is not to praise the craft of the call to arms, but to refuse the alibi that “mere politics” offers to formal analysis.

Let us name the paradox clearly. The call to arms depends on beauty to sell death, yet the critical impulse to analyse that beauty risks participating in its seduction.

Reframing political speech as art does not elevate it. It indicts it with greater precision. If the state is the gesamtkunstwerk and the call to arms is one of its leitmotifs, then art history, theatre studies and rhetoric belong in the same room as international relations. Not to prettify power, but to map it. The practical consequence is straightforward. Teach Bush’s trilogy of Iraq speeches alongside Cicero and Demosthenes. Stage them in spaces where applause is not compulsory. Mark the tropes as tropes, the proximisation as a manoeuvre, the fear as a design feature. Then ask, with no protective distance: how many times must we hear this genre repeat itself before we learn to resist its music?

Bibliography

Alexander, J. C., The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power. Oxford UP, Oxford, 2010.

Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Translated by George A. Kennedy, Oxford UP, Oxford, 2007.

—. Poetics. Translated by Malcolm Heath, Penguin, London, 1996.

Aspriadis, N., Political Rhetoric in Times of Crisis: Discursive Strategies of Legitimization. Routledge, London and New York, 2019.

—. Fear Appeals in Political Discourse: Rhetoric, Emotion, and Persuasion. Routledge, London and New York, 2020.

—. “Recontextualizing Fascism: Putin’s Rhetoric of Denazification.” Journal of Language and Politics, vol. 21, no. 1, 2022, pp. 55–73.

Bakhtin, M. M., Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. University of Texas Press, Austin, 1986.

Barthes, R., Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath, Hill and Wang, New York, 1977.

Benjamin, W., The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA, 2008.

Burke, E., A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by Adam Phillips, Oxford UP, Oxford, 1990.

Bush, G. W., “President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended.” The White House, Washington, DC, 1 May 2003.

—. “President Bush Announces Military Strikes Against Iraq.” The White House, Washington, DC, 19 Mar. 2003.

—. “President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat.” The White House, Washington, DC, 7 Oct. 2002.

—. “President Delivers State of the Union Address.” The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 29 Jan. 2002.

—. “President Says Saddam Hussein Must Leave Iraq within 48 Hours.” The White House, Washington, DC, 17 Mar. 2003.

Butler, J., Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge, New York and London, 1997.

Campbell, K. K. et al., Deeds Done in Words: Presidential Rhetoric and the Genres of Governance. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990.

Cannadine, D., Churchill: The Statesman as Orator. Oxford UP, Oxford, 2002.

Cap, P., Proximization: The Pragmatics of Symbolic Distance Crossing. John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 2013.

—. Proximization Theory: Representing Events in Discourse. John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 2013.

Ceaser, J. W. et al., The Rise of Modern Political Rhetoric. Basic Books, New York, 1981.

Charteris-Black, J., Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. 2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2011.

Chilton, P., Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. Routledge, London and New York, 2004.

Cicero, On the Ideal Orator. Translated by James M. May and Jakob Wisse, Oxford UP, Oxford, 2001.

—. On the Orator (De Oratore), Book II. Translated by E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA, 1942.

Debord, G., The Society of the Spectacle. Zone Books, New York, 1995.

Demosthenes, The Olynthiacs. Translated by J. H. Vince, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA, 1930.

Fairclough, N., Language and Power. 2nd ed., Longman, London, 2001.

Fairclough, N. and Wodak, R., Discourse as Social Interaction. Sage, London, 1997, pp. 258–84.

Fischer-Lichte, E., The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Routledge, London and New York, 2008.

Foster, H., The Return of the Real. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996.

Frow, J., Genre. Routledge, London and New York, 2005.

Habermas, J., The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991.

Halliday, M. A. K., Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. Edward Arnold, London, 1978.

Hunt, L., Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984.

Jamieson, K. H., Eloquence in an Electronic Age. Oxford UP, Oxford, 1988.

Kennedy, G. A., Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times. 2nd ed., University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1999.

Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M., Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980.

Lucas, S. E., ed., The Art of Public Speaking: 35 Greatest Speeches in History. McGraw-Hill, New York, 2012.

Oddo, J., The Discourse of Propaganda: Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State UP, University Park, PA, 2018.

Oesterreich, G., Neostoicism and the Early Modern State. Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1982.

Putin, V., “Address by the President of the Russian Federation.” Kremlin, Moscow, 24 Feb. 2022.

—. “Address by the President of the Russian Federation on Accession of New Regions.” Kremlin, Moscow, 30 Sept. 2022.

—. “Address by President of the Russian Federation.” Kremlin, Moscow, 18 Mar. 2014.

Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, Book XII. Translated by Donald A. Russell, Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA, 2001.

Rancière, J., The Politics of Aesthetics. Continuum, London and New York, 2004.

Skinner, Q., Visions of Politics, Vol. 1: Regarding Method. Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 2002.

Turner, V., The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine, Chicago, 1969.

Vickers, B., In Defence of Rhetoric. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988.

Ward, J. O., Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art. Brepols, Turnhout, 1995.

Warner, M., Publics and Counterpublics. Zone Books, New York, 2002.

Wodak, R., The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. Sage, London, 2015.