Letter #95: Is American Exceptionalism Dead? Part III

“Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.” – Blaise Pascal, Les Pensées (1669)

Letter #95 to Friends and Familiares #95: Is American Exceptionalism Dead? Part III: What American Exceptionalism is Not

The first two essays in this series have delved into the external symptoms and inward flaws that indicate the approaching end of America's exceptionalism, at least in terms of power. In my next essay, I commit to spell out what I believe American exceptionalism is supposed to be, if indeed it exists at all.  My thinking on this apparently arrogant subject has a lot more to do with principles than power. In that sense, those in our time who have espoused this concept have come from diverse backgrounds and include people as far apart as the Reverend Martin Luther King and President Gerald Ford.

To find the thread that binds together these men, and many women as well, I would like to start out by clarifying the popular notion behind the rhetorical device of this American exceptionalism. While this notion, and variants of it, has its adherents, my sense is that the leading idea of this exceptionalism is a misconception that America’s might makes right her actions or that American leadership is an exceptionally malignant force in the world because of this 'hyper-power' and has been for a while.

Neither imperialism nor its dialectic of “leading from behind” is a source of American exceptionalism.  Each represents a reaction to the rise of American commercial power and military capacity. While American imperialism began to appear from the early nineteenth century onward, it has only been the last fifty years during which the illusion of coercion has intoxicated too many leaders into an amoral realpolitik or, worse, into a tendency to project military force too quickly at the expense of the weak.

One view produces bloodless calculation, as seen in the stark indifference to the unceasing slaughterin Syria. The other view has produced the string of phony wars in the Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, Kosovo, Serbia and Libya as well as pushed for invasions of bloody consequence in Viêt Nam and, perhaps, in Iraq. While coincident with the apotheosis of American commercial power, that economic leadership preceded this hubris of power by almost a century. Things started changing when the British, exhausted and insolvent after two world wars, handed their empire and policing role to their ‘American cousins’.

Unfortunately, the counterpoint to this inflation of power – the notion of leading from behind – is an over-reaction to this hubris and often degenerates  into an excuse for indifferent diffidence that compromises what American exceptionalism ought properly to be.  In a sense, this new paradigm of leading from behind parallels the British shift away from empire seventy years ago.  In the case of the United States and her accession to empire, the world saw two large empires squaring off for almost five decades in another world war of ideas. 

Both the United States and Soviet Union divvied up the policing powers according to immediate interests at play.  Imperialism and policing is not a sustainable foreign policy; war broke down (at least) direct British influence in the Second World War.  The Cold War was another world conflict that bankrupted the U.S.S.R. As the lone ‘hyper-power’ for the last quarter century, America’s policing role and aggressive pursuit of policy has basically made the U.S. insolvent with wartime debt levels in peacetime and a monetary policy that has the world sloshing through deep pools of inert currency. 

(Once that currency moves or others trade in their stored dollars for other newly recognized store-value currencies and / or selling off Treasury notes and bonds, inflation will spike and accelerate a long-deferred deflation of artificially high asset values generated by near-zero percent rates suppressing the discount rates applied to asset valuations. The American people are weary of war-making far from home with dubious assertions of national security where inconvenient challenges tend to be exaggerated into existential threats.)

Thus, this doctrine of leading from behind is the American version of handing off the hegemon function, with its attendant costs, to others.  In the case of Syria and Ukraine, the unhappy beneficiary of this bequeathing of power appears to be the European Union, particularly Germany.  The problem is that the Germany-led E.U. is as unprepared today to assume that mantle as were the United States when Great Britain made this shift in the 1940s. 

The unwillingness of the current Administration to initiate the process of a significant push-back in the face of evil or illegal aggression – that is, take the lead through a concerted first step so new partnering powers can feel empowered to stand with the democracies – has vitiated leading from behind to a public compromise of what our Republic stands for.   The United States is managing to alienate allies, to embolden terrorists and to encourage illegal expansionism.  

In short, the stars and stripes are coming to mean weapons or self-enriching development aid for many of the world’s poor while, at the same time, the disenfranchised of the earth see America backing away from confrontations with countries strong enough to impose significant casualties.  This behavior of a school-yard bully – by bombing defenseless countries while recoiling from more powerful adversaries – surely cannot be the stuff of American exceptionalism.

If it is, then those friends of mine who argue that American exceptionalism is a myth used to justify armed adventurism to safeguard short-term, primarily economic, interests are sadly correct in their heated assertions. Nevertheless, there has been an American exceptionalism forged in the past and applied judiciously across two centuries, until the 1960s, as the United States evolved from a struggling post-colonial state in 1784, an emerging economy in 1820 and a great power in 1860.  More about that soon.