American Exceptionalism

Hilde Eliassen Restad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135048587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

How does American exceptionalism shape American foreign policy? Conventional wisdom states that American exceptionalism comes in two variations – the exemplary version and the missionary version.

Being exceptional, experts in U.S. foreign policy argue, means that you either withdraw from the world like an isolated but inspiring "city upon a hill, " or that you are called upon to actively lead the rest of the world to a better future. In her book, Hilde EliassenRestad challenges this assumption, arguing that U.S. history has displayed a remarkably constant foreign policy tradition, which she labels unilateral internationalism. The United States, Restad argues, has not vacillated between an "exemplary" and a "missionary" identity. Instead, the United States developed an exceptionalist identity that, while idealizing the United States as an exemplary "city upon a hill, " more often than not errs on the side of the missionary crusade in its foreign policy. Utilizing the latest historiography in the study of U.S. foreign relations, the book updates political science scholarship and sheds new light on the role American exceptionalism has played – and continues to play – in shaping America's role in the world.

This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of US foreign policy, security studies, and American politics.

1
How to be an American

It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one.

(Richard Hofstadter)¹

Prelude

In 2007, Barack H. Obama announced that he was running for president. His announcement set off a rather unusual series of events in the history of U.S. presidential elections. At first, Obama was accused of not being born in the United States.² Next, Obama was accused, in various and often not too subtle ways, of being anti-American. During television appearances on Fox News and NBC in June 2008, political commentator Dick Morris argued that “[T]he question that plagues Obama is . . . Is he pro-American?” and stated that “[T]his whole debate about what kind of president [Sen. Barack] Obama would make has swirled around almost an existential level. Is he sort of a Manchurian candidate? A sleeper agent? Or is he the great hope of the future?”³

Democratic pollster Mark Penn advised Hillary Clinton to target Obama’s “lack of American roots” in the primary by “explicitly own[ing] ‘American’ ” in her campaign.⁴ After Obama’s election to the White House, a third and subtler way of arguing that the president was not truly American emerged. Specifically, President Obama was accused of not believing in “American exceptionalism.” In an influential cover story for the National Review Online, Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru wrote:

It is madness to consider President Obama a foreigner. But it is blindness to ignore that American exceptionalism has homegrown enemies – people who misunderstand the sources of American greatness or think them outdated. If they succeed, we will be less free, less innovative, less rich, less self-governing, and less secure. We will be less.⁵

President Obama’s answer to a question of whether he believed in American exceptionalism at a G20 press conference in Strasbourg in 2009 seemed to give credence to this suspicion. Obama responded by saying that he did believe in American exceptionalism, but then added another sentence that seemed to qualify its very nature: “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”⁶ His reported answer set off a hectic debate in the American media,⁷ most of which ignored the rest of Obama’s answer. Obama, in the tradition of all U.S. presidents, of course went on to say that he was enormously proud of his country “and its role and history in the world.” In fact, he said:

If you think about the site of this summit [Strasbourg] and what it means, 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 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.⁸

But the suspicion that the United States would be “less” under a president who ostensibly did not believe in American exceptionalism had taken root. Further evidence of this, Obama’s critics thought, was to be found in the president’s handling of the Arab Spring from December 2010 onward. Aiming to lighten the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East after the Bush administration’s controversial “war on terror,” the Obama administration’s initial approach to the Arab awakening was perceived as somewhat hesitant. From the administration’s perspective, being involved in two wars in the Middle East while also being widely distrusted throughout the region necessitated a cautious strategy. This “wait-and-see” approach in the spring of 2011 amounted to the “unpatriotic acceptance of fading national glory,” as The New Yorker argued that critics were thinking.⁹ In the specific case of a possible, and controversial, intervention in Libya, the strategy was labeled “leading from behind” by a White House official.¹⁰ Republican presidential hopeful at the time Mitt Romney latched onto the phrase, declaring: “God did not create this country to be a nation of followers. America must lead the world, or someone else will.”¹¹

The argument

This book is about the connection between American exceptionalism and U.S. foreign policy, but aims to challenge the conventional manner in which the two have been coupled.

Most writers on U.S. foreign policy agree that domestic ideas about what kind of country the United States is affect its foreign policy.¹² Whether in the study of U.S. commitment to multilateralism,¹³ post-cold war policy,¹⁴ or the historic U.S. foreign policy traditions,¹⁵ scholars write extensively about the importance of an American identity for its foreign policy.

In this book, I argue first, that American exceptionalism is a meaningful and helpful way of defining the elusive category of American identity. This means, as we shall see, treating it not as objective truth, but as subjective self-understanding.

Second, I argue that the belief in exceptionalism has had a deep and lasting effect on how the United States relates to the world. Specifically, American exceptionalism has contributed to a more constant foreign policy tradition than commonly argued. I call this tradition unilateral internationalism, meaning that the United States has always been internationalist (engaging with the world politically, economically, and militarily) but has preferred to conduct its foreign policy in a unilateral, rather than multilateral, manner. As we saw from the reactions to President Obama’s multilateral strategy in Libya in 2011, engaging in substantive multilateralism is in fact seen as being “un-American.” The United States does not play by any other rules than its own, and will certainly not be seen as being led by others.

My argument differs from conventional literature, which argues either that the United States historically has vacillated between cycles of intervention and isolation, or that the early period of U.S. foreign policy was isolationist or at least non-interventionist, but that the United States became – with the harrowing experience of World War II – a committed multilateral internationalist. I will refute both the cyclical and the periodic theses of U.S. foreign policy.

In short, I will argue first, that the belief in the idea of American exceptionalism is a useful definition of American identity, and second that it has contributed to a more constant unilateral internationalist foreign policy than most other scholars recognize.

A definition to start with

What is American exceptionalism? Definitions abound, often because authors confuse the objective and subjective definitions of it. Looking at American exceptionalism as a national identity, I argue that it is made up of three important ideas. Each idea represents a different aspect of the perceived historic significance of the United States and inspires a certain kind of foreign policy, all of which are internationalist in orientation. First is the idea that the United States is distinct from the Old World; second, that it has a special and unique role to play in world history; and third, that the United States will resist the laws of history (meaning that it will rise to great power status yet it will not fall, as all previous republics have).¹⁶ These three aspects have important consequences for how the United States relates to the rest of the world. Let us briefly examine them.

I The distinction

The significance of seeing “America” as “distinct” is not that it denotes the United States as different from the rest of the world; it is that it invokes a normative hierarchy of nations on which the United States sits atop. In other words, American exceptionalism entails viewing the United States as better than all other nations. This is different from patriotism.¹⁷ “Our country has always been exceptional,” writes the National Review Online:

It is freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth. These qualities are the bequest of our Founding and of our cultural heritage. They have always marked America as special, with a unique role and mission in the world: as a model of ordered liberty and self-government and as an exemplar of freedom and a vindicator of it, through persuasion when possible and force of arms when absolutely necessary.¹⁸

If one does not believe that American exceptionalism means better rather than different, one’s Americanness is open to questioning. This is the significance of the criticism Obama encountered after his answer to the question posed to him in France in 2009. Obama’s answer seemed to convey an understanding of American exceptionalism as a subjective idea, not as an objective fact. Contrasting a belief in American exceptionalism with self-understandings found in other nations such as Britain and Greece, meant the negation of the – seemingly – objective nature of American exceptionalism.

The identity-affirming power of seeing the United States as better rather than different is something that can be traced back throughout American history. In an editorial in the United States Journal on October 18, 1845, one finds this optimistic assessment: “we, the American people, are the most independent, intelligent, moral and happy people on the face of the earth.” In 1935, surveying the power of American nationalism in the nineteenth century, historian Albert K. Weinberg wrote that the “philosophy of American nationalism developed a belief incongruous with the equalitarianism of democracy – the belief that, however equal men might be at birth, Americans had become subsequently a super-people.”¹⁹ Weinberg was studying “manifest destiny,” an idea that provided the ideational fuel for the vast continental empire that the United States claimed for itself from 1787 to 1867. Manifest destiny, in fact, constituted the nineteenth century version of seventeenth and eighteenth century American exceptionalism, as the next chapter chronicles.²⁰ The debate over manifest destiny and continental expansion seen in the 1830s would also foreshadow later debates and rhetoric on why the United States must first obtain a commercial empire on the sea, and later, world power status.

Initially, the distinction of “America” was its relative superiority to Europe. The animating idea of the first part of the definition of American exceptionalism is that the New World superseded the Old. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson had thought that there was, in effect, a different code of natural law governing the two worlds, Old and New:

I strongly suspect that our geographical peculiarities may call for a different code of natural law to govern relations with other nations from that which the conditions of Europe have given rise to there.²¹

American exceptionalism entails believing that the founding of the United States inaugurated a new era in world history, where a completely new and different political entity entered the world stage. This belief in U.S. distinction is powerful, persistent, and pervasive and as alive today as it was in early U.S. history. Polling shows that Americans display the highest degree of national pride among Western democracies. Researchers at the University of Chicago reported that before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 90 percent of the Americans surveyed agreed with the statement, “I would rather be a citizen of America than of any other country in the world.”²² The World Values Survey of 2001 reported more than 70 percent of those surveyed declaring themselves “very proud” to be ...