Regarding American Exceptionalism...

It's real, but it's not always spectacular.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

It would appear that my Foreign Affairs essay “The End of American Exceptionalism” has gotten some traction in the discourse. It’s been the most-read article on Foreign Affairs’ website for most of last week. It got quoted in the New York Times — always gratifying for a writer.

Of course, something read so widely will also prompt critical feedback. That is a good thing! No author craves criticism, mind you, but writers who receive nothing but praise are living in an epistemic bubble that will dull their senses.

For this essay, both the title and the closing paragraphs referencing American Exceptionalism have triggered the greatest reaction. Here’s how my FA essay ended:

[One] trend that Trump 2.0 will accelerate is the end of American exceptionalism. From Harry Truman to Joe Biden, U.S. presidents have embraced the notion that American values and ideals play an important role in U.S. foreign policy. This claim has been contested at various times, but promoting democracy and advancing human rights has been identified as in the national interest for quite some time. The political scientist Joseph Nye has argued that these American ideals are a core component of U.S. soft power.

U.S. policy blunders, as well as Russian “whataboutism”—deflecting criticism of one’s own bad behavior by pointing to another’s bad behavior—have eroded the power of American exceptionalism. Trump 2.0 will bury it. Indeed, Trump himself embraces a version of whataboutism when it comes to American values. Early in his first term he noted, “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think—our country’s so innocent?”

Back then, foreign audiences could rationalize that most Americans did not believe this, given that Trump did not win the popular vote. The 2024 election shatters that belief. During the campaign, Trump promised to bomb Mexico and to deport legal immigrants, called opposition politicians the “enemies from within,” and claimed that migrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country. Despite all this—or perhaps because of it—Trump won a popular majority. When the rest of the world looks at Trump, they will no longer see an aberrant exception to American exceptionalism; they will see what America stands for in the twenty-first century.

This argument did not go down well with everyone. I received a fraction of responses suggesting one of the following:

1. American exceptionalism died long ago, after Iraq Vietnam Guatemala;

2. The very notion of American exceptionalism is absurd and anyone who suggests otherwise is horribly provincial;

3. American exceptionalism is what led to American hubris is what led to… gestures around wildly.¹

For example, Wired’s David Gilbert posted, “As a non-American, the idea of "American exceptionalism" seemed so ludicrous yet speaking to a wide range of people [in America] in recent weeks suggests it’s a believe that is STILL pervasive.” He followed up with, “what amazes me is how this idea has persisted, even among Americans I view as otherwise sane. I guess when you are thought from a very young age by your parents/teachers that America is the greatest country on the planet, it's a hard idea to shake, despite the overwhelming flood of evidence.”

In the interest of continuing my pleasant amnesia of the very existence of The Newsroom, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has minimal interest in debating whether America is the greatest country on the planet.² It’s also mostly extraneous to the point I was making. And that point was that a significant fraction of both Americans and non-Americans believe there is something exceptional about the United States, and that this has aided the United States in its foreign relations.

There is a domestic component to American exceptionalism that dates back to Alexis de Tocqueville and encompasses the likes of Seymour Martin Lipset and Louis Hartz.³ What I wrote was explicitly about the foreign policy dimension of American exceptionalism — the idea that American foreign policy, as distinct from other great power foreign policies, contained an ideational component that embodied the best of America’s founding ideas: disdaining empire, promoting democracy, and emphasizing human rights.

Has the United States consistently prioritized these ideals? No, of course not, American foreign policy has been shot through with hypocrisy for centuries. But have these ideals been a component of American foreign policy since its founding? Yes, of course they have. No less a notable than John Quincy Adams, in his most well-known speech praising foreign policy restraint, talked about how the global meaning of the Declaration of Independence:

The first solemn declaration by a nation of the only legitimate foundation of civil government. It was the corner stone of a new fabric, destined to cover the surface of the globe. It demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest. It swept away all the rubbish of accumulated centuries of servitude. It announced in practical form to the world the transcendent truth of the unalienable sovereignty of the people….

What has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful cars, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. (emphasis added).

This element of American thinking is what led to the United States adopting a largely anti-imperialist foreign policy in the wake of the Second World War, led the U.S. to pressure Great Britain to withdraw from the Suez Canal, prodded myriad governments to improve their human rights protections from the Carter administration onwards, and helped to midwife the third wave of democratization.

Again, this isn’t all that American foreign policy was about during these years. There was a lot of hypocrisy. But hypocrisy alone does not dissolve these ideas. As Henry Farrell blogged, “American exceptionalism has always been riddled with hypocrisy. Still, even if hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, it is a kind of homage, and on the whole you ought prefer a superpower that can occasionally be shamed into better behavior to one that cannot.”⁴

Indeed, one can argue, as Jill Lepore did in These Truths, that American history is defined by the struggle to live up to American ideals:

There is, to be sure, a great deal of anguish in American history and more hypocrisy. No nation and no people are relieved of these. But there is also, in the American past, an extraordinary amount of decency and hope, of prosperity and ambition, and much, especially, of invention and beauty…. These truths on which the nation was founded are no mysteries, articles of faith, never to be questioned, as if the founding were an act of God, but neither are they lies, all facts fictions, as if nothing can be known, in a world without truth.

Realists and other critics like to argue that this part of American exceptionalism can, taken to its extremes, be crusading and moralistic and utopian. This ain’t entirely wrong, but it is incomplete. John Quincy Adams was right to note the universal appeal of these American ideals. Joe Nye was right to include American ideals as an integral part of American soft power. And public opinion polling shows that despite Vietnam, despite Iraq, despite even the first term of Donald Trump, a lot of people across the world trusted the word of the United States more than that of other nations.

This is because, as E.H. Carr explained in his exegesis on utopian and realist thinking, there is an undeniable power to utopian thinking. It is only by giving humans a sense of agency, a social purpose and a ground for moral action that effective political thinking is possible. That is why president after president has invoked American ideals in their rhetoric even as they violated those ideas in practice.

Back in the day, Republicans blasted Barack Obama for saying this about American exceptionalism early in his first term:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. I'm enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world…. I don't think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.

And if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.

Many of these same Republicans now embrace a leader who rubbishes the idea. Where Trump stands apart as president is his consistent, persistent rhetorical rejection of American exceptionalism. In rejecting American ideals, Trump may well believe that he will win friends and acolytes from the Vladimir Putins of the world. But in the process, he is throwing away the various soft power benefits discussed above. And in voting for him, the American people have ratified this message.

That is what I mean when I said we have reached the end of American exceptionalism. For those who think it’s a good thing, fine, you’re entitled to that opinion. For those who believe it never existed, or never mattered, or died a long time ago: I respectfully but firmly dissent.

1. Even proponents of American exceptionalism acknowledge that it’s far from an unalloyed good. Heck, in American Exceptionalism, Seymour Martin Lipset wrote, “American values are quite complex, particularly because of paradoxes within our culture that permit pernicious and beneficial social phenomena to arise simultaneously from the same basic beliefs.”

2. Fine, I lied about forgetting The Newsroom. I will always laugh at this clip. And I will go to my grave believing that this clip is: a) even funnier; and b) contains all of Aaron Sorkin’s worst writing pathologies.

3. Also, to be fair, the domestic component of American exceptionalism is linked to the foreign policy component. One could argue that the narrative about the United States being different than other great powers in its origin story is a component of American soft power. This ties into the “shining city on a hill” metaphor that myriad Americans have promoted.

4. That is not all that Henry wrote — more about that later in the week. But FFS, please read Programmable Mutter, it’s top shelf.