Delighted for a dairy queen in Egypt: US foreign policy leadership discourse in the Middle East during Arab Spring

ABSTRACT Ample studies scrutinized what the Arab Spring meant for communication and politics in the Middle East and beyond. The rhetoric of the U.S. ambassadors stationed in those countries during the Arab Spring, however, remains understudied. Applying critical discourse analysis to the communications of the U.S. ambassadors in Egypt, Kuwait, Tunisia, and Bahrain during the Arab Spring shows that the U.S. ambassadors did not support these movements, but they used them to recruit the countries into the fold of global neoliberalism during an unstable period.