Abstract

This paper conducts a critical discourse analysis of justification in the speeches of the American president of the United States of America, Joe Biden, about the US troops' withdrawal from Afghanistan. It aims to analyze the manipulative language that the American president uses in order to justify the decision to withdraw in 2021. The paper tries to bridge a gap in the linguistic research concerning critically investigating the concept of 'justification' in Biden's speeches. The analysis is done by answering the following questions: (1) What manipulative language strategies does the US president employ in his speech in order to justify his decision to withdraw? (2) What speech acts and rhetorical strategies does the president employ to persuade his audience to accept and support his decision to withdraw? The paper adopts van Dijk's (2006c) 'Discourse and Manipulation' as a model for analyzing the selected data. The paper concluded that the American president uses a particular effective and manipulative language in order to justify the decision to withdraw, and ideologically, the American president, depending on his status and power, tries to use particular speech acts and rhetorical strategies to impose his ideologies to get his decision justified.