‘America Will Call Evil by its Name’: ‘Evil’ as a Theologically and Morally Loaded Notion in American Foreign Policy Discourse

One of the epithets for which former US President George W. Bush became infamous was used in his State of the Union Address just four short months after 9/11. In that address he described three nations — Iran, North Korea and Iraq — as members of an ‘Axis of Evil’ constituting a clear and present danger to global peace. In this soundbite, the then leader of the free world expressed the belief that ‘evil’, a deeply religious concept, existed in geopolitical and geostrategic entities, often embodied in individual leaders like Saddam Hussein (‘the evil one’) or Osama bin Laden (‘an evil man’). Evil, with its visceral connections to notions of sin and rebellion against God, speaks to extreme wrongdoing and is instinctively opposed by its absolute opposite — good.