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The article asks the question, how foreign policy is explained by analyzing historical analogies that are voiced by policymakers? It is claimed that conventional approaches are too narrow because of two reasons. The first reason is the way conventional approaches perceive the role of historical analogies. The second reason is the dominance of positivist assumptions about history and language analysis in conventional approaches. This article presents an alternative explanation of how and why policymakers use historical analogies and develops new model for analysis of historical analogies. The model is based on the assumptions of rule-oriented constructivism, speech act theory and dialogical analysis method.

The article asks the question, how foreign policy is explained by analyzing historical analogies that are voiced by policymakers? It is claimed that conventional approaches are too narrow because of two reasons. The first reason is the way conventional approaches perceive the role of historical analogies. The second reason is the dominance of positivist assumptions about history and language analysis in conventional approaches. This article presents an alternative explanation of how and why policymakers use historical analogies and develops new model for analysis of historical analogies. The model is based on the assumptions of rule-oriented constructivism, speech act theory and dialogical analysis method.

On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Over the next three days, President George H.W. Bush, his advisors, and world leaders would debate and determine the United States' goals and objectives. These decisions would compel the country's trajectory for the next several months. The process regarding the determination to reverse Iraqi aggression, if necessary with force, provides a compelling case study regarding the use of historical analogies in presidential decision making. Using original archival research, this in‐depth history reveals that historical analogies played a key role in shaping policy on the eve of the Iraq War. This article provides the most complete history of the use of analogies in the initial response to the Gulf crisis to date, as well as valuable insight into the Gulf War, President H.W. Bush, and the process of presidential decision making.

AbstractSince the turn of the millennium, major political figures around the world have been routinely compared to Adolf Hitler. These comparisons have increasingly been investigated by scholars, who have sought to explain their origins and assess their legitimacy. This article sheds light on this ongoing debate by examining an earlier, but strikingly similar, discussion that transpired during the Nazi era itself. Whereas commentators today argue about whether Hitler should be used as a historical analogy, observers in the 1930s and 1940s debated which historical analogies should be used to explain Hitler. During this period, Anglophone and German writers identified a diverse group of historical villains who, they believed, explained the Nazi threat. The figures spanned a wide range of tyrants, revolutionaries, and conquerors. But, by the end of World War II, the revelation of the Nazis' unprecedented crimes exposed these analogies as insufficient and led many commentators to flee from secular history to religious mythology. In the process, they identified Hitler as Western civilization's new archetype of evil and turned him into a hegemonic analogy for the postwar period. By explaining how earlier analogies struggled to make sense of Hitler, we can better understand whether Hitler analogies today are helping or hindering our effort to understand contemporary political challenges.

Abstract
Conflicts and their discursive representations involve, apart from the spacio-temporal dimension, also the
socio-ideological and axiological positions. These prompt the desired emotional response from the audience in a form of
authorization for the intended action. All these dimensions are mainly construed by presenting series of assertions by creating
the dichotomy self-other and by triggering implicatures that contribute to the preferred interpretations of the presented
representations. This paper aims to examine the role of quotes and historical analogies triggered by quotes in discourse,
concretely, it focuses on the way the Ukrainian conflict is proximized in the US and the Czech political discourse, namely in the
parliamentary debates and governmental statements (November 2013–December 2014). The theoretical framework applied is the
proximization approach (Cap 2008, 2010,
2013, 2014, 2017) which is complemented by the studies that explore the pragmatic functions of quoting in
discourse.