The end of American exceptionalism?

In his address to the nation on September 9, President Obama invoked the hoary doctrine of American exceptionalism to defend his right to unilaterally attack Syria. America, he said, although a member of the international community, has an elevated status by virtue of its special responsibilities.

“For the past seven decades,” he said, “the United States has been the anchor of global security. This has meant doing more than forging international agreements— it has meant enforcing them.” America’s position in this regard, he went on, was “exceptional,” and also unique.

The president went on to say that he had full authority to determine the nature and scope of “enforcement” activities without the consent of Congress or the approval of the country, much less of the world community. Such a claim would raise not only a single country but also a single individual above the rest of the world.

Pilgrims’ pride

Exceptionalism is a slippery term because it has two distinct connotations in modern political thought. The notion with which we are familiar goes back to the Puritan concept of America as a Redeemer nation, blessed by Providence and destined to lead the world.

Ronald Reagan expressed this idea in describing America as a city on a hill, invoking the image made famous by the Puritan John Winthrop. Woodrow Wilson cast the same idea in secular terms in leading America into World War I to make the world “safe for democracy.”

The other meaning of exception was introduced by the German political philosopher Carl Schmitt, whose ideas found favor among the Nazis (and still remain influential).

Universal sovereign?

All societies, Schmitt contended, face situations in which existing laws don’t meet current needs. Whoever was empowered to act in such situations is the sovereign, and the sovereign’s acts are unreviewable and final. In other words, power is the exception; it’s the condition in which the laws don’t apply.

I would suggest that President Obama was referencing both senses of exceptionalism in his address, and declaring himself a universal sovereign beyond all other rulers.

Obama’s contention was that the American president trumped the sovereign claims of all other rulers. He did so because, as the president asserted, America’s military pre-eminence was the ultimate guarantor of international order.

America knows best

This pre-eminence was a fact of life, but one that was justified, he argued, by America’s superior virtue. Only that virtue could justify the unfettered right to act on behalf of all other sovereigns, with or without their consent.

For Schmitt, the state of exception was a response to necessity, unconstrained by law or morality. In the Obama version, it means the right to define necessity for everyone else. Whether openly stated or not, Obama’s assumption was that America knew best because America was best.

American presidents and other officials have been saying this sort of thing for a long time. This time, they got a reply from one of those lesser sovereigns, Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Writing in the New York Times two days after Obama’s speech, Putin declared that it was “extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

Moscow as the ”˜Third Rome’

Of course the Russians have their own long history of exceptionalism, indeed one even longer than our own. After the fall of the Byzantine Empire, Moscow was declared to be the “Third Rome,” the final incarnation of Christianity that was destined to bring light to the world. This messianic fervor, like ours, found secular expression in the Bolshevik belief that Soviet Communism would liberate the world and inaugurate the universal reign of socialism.

Russia has learned, to its cost, that messianic visions can backfire badly. Present-day Russia, shorn since 1991 of a third of its former territory and half its former population, cuts a much more modest figure in the world. It no longer challenges the U.S., economically or militarily.

Still, Putin has performed a valuable service. This is not a world in which any single nation can or should attempt to speak or act for all.

Leading by example?

In the Syrian crisis, for the first time since World War II the U.S. has found itself completely isolated in a proposed military intervention. (I pass over the belated expressions of support by François Hollande, who almost certainly does not speak for France.)

This isolation should tell us that we’re no longer leading the world, nor successfully dictating to it. It should tell us that exceptionalism is a failed doctrine, and that the enormous challenges facing the world can only be met by building consensus.

America can lead by example, though it has time and again led the wrong way. It has not maintained but undermined the world order by ignoring the United Nations and international courts, and by often flouting agreements to which it is a party.

Envy of the world?

In any case, the expense of supporting a bloated and hyperextended military will sooner or later do us in, as it did the Soviet Union. Already much of our domestic infrastructure has decayed alarmingly, and our crippled politics makes adequate social investment next to impossible. The state of exception toward which we are headed is not one the world will envy.

Perhaps, then, the lesson of Syria— if we learn it— will begin to sober us up. The fact that the president was unable to sell his war— that “unbelievably small” war that John Kerry finally fell back on— shows that even Americans’ passivity has its limits.

I have scant hope that the Washington political establishment will take the point. The country will have to teach its leaders, which is what is supposed to happen in a democracy anyway.♦


To read a related commentary by Patrick D. Hazard, click here.
To read a response, click here.