The present study intends to demonstrate and analyze how powerful a role language and discourse may have with regard to its appropriate application in the foreign policy actions of one of the world's leading nations. The thesis deals with United States' approach in making foreign policy decisions with reference to the Middle East, more specifically with focus on the countries of Iraq and Egypt. The two most recent American administrations, those of Bush and Obama shall provide the proclamations for the study. The core of the thesis lies in the analysis of language and discourse, more precisely in the semantic and linguistic concepts, i.e. how the language is used in order to create the discourse that would best serve the user's purpose. For the purposes of the study a term concepts of discourse is used, which can be found in the selected proclamations. By these it is understood presidential and other government representatives' speeches and official statements published by the White House on behalf of the Presidents and their administrations. These proclamations were chosen to represent the suitable language application, in order to carry out the analysis.
A supplementary analysis question of the thesis is whether there is a consistent and selective employment of U.S. foreign policy discourse for the countries in question. Is there different and/or contrasting language used within the various concepts of discourse to suit the U.S. foreign policy goals? If so, how is it applied and what effect does it have? .
The expected results of this research are (1) to provide a comprehensive demonstration of the intentional employment of specific language that forms a desired discourse, which can be used further in favor of the initiator of this discourse, (2) to prove the selectivity and inequality of discourse and language usage in U.S. foreign policy with regard to the studied cases. .
As far as the methodology and theory are concerned, the thesis uses a qualitative content analytical research method and applies principals of the Critical Discourse Analysis, which is a discipline that provides the guidelines of the research method as well as supportive theory for the researched arguments.
