American Exceptionalism, Myths And Reality

On 19 February 1998 speaking on NBC, Madeleine Albright, then US Secretary of State, in the context of the use of force against Iraq, declared that “if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.” More recently, on 19 October 2023, as the Israeli intervention into Gaza was in its second week, President Joe Biden asserted that “American leadership is what holds the world together” and that “American values are what make us a partner that other nations want to work with.”

One could easily dismiss these claims as traditional clichés aimed at domestic consumption since it was clear to everyone that the “world” is certainly not being held together but constantly disrupted if not endangered by events which the USA cannot control: events such the Russian invasion of Ukraine, now in its second year, the apparently unresolvable Middle Eastern crisis, the various conflicts in Africa which are barely mentioned by the media, the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan, the difficulty in mediating the conflict between Serbia and Kosovo, the inability to prevent the repression of the Yazidi in Iraqi Kurdistan, of the Rohingya in Myanmar, and of the Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang.

Yet Biden’s clichés should not be dismissed since they are part of historical claims to distinctiveness which have proliferated for decades, if not centuries. Many countries consider themselves “exceptional.” We have had the l’exception française (signaling the pretention of cultural superiority), l’anomalia italiana (lamenting that Italy is lagging behind other modern countries), the German Sonderweg (describing, before Hitler, the peculiar path towards industrialization and, after Hitler, explaining why it led to Nazism). The British glory in the self-congratulatory view of national progress through peaceful reform (forgetting that they executed their king well before the French executed theirs).

Nevertheless, it is true that America’s own path was unique and unrepeatable. It had its own sense of possessing an extraordinary destiny, something not all countries can have. Tocqueville noted that the “position of the Americans is … quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.” Walt Whitman was quite certain about this. In his 1867 poem, “As I Sat Alone by Blue Ontario’s Shores,” he wrote:

Any period, one nation must lead,
One land must be the promise and reliance of the future.

You did not need a formal empire to have a mission civilisatrice, as long as you had a “manifest destiny,” a term coined by the American journalist John O’Sullivan in 1845 when trying to justify the annexation of Texas: adding that no other nation (alluding to England and France) would try to limit “our greatness” and check “the fulfilment of our manifest destiny…”

For a long time, the “manifest destiny” was limited to the ambition of being a regional power. The Monroe Doctrine (1823) declared that any European attempt to colonize any part of South America would be viewed as an act of aggression (though one the USA would have been unable to prevent). In any case, no European powers had either the intention or the strength to colonize any parts of Latin America. The USA refrained from intervening outside the Americas. The exception was the Philippines which became an American colony in 1899. The reasoning was similar to that of the Europeans: President McKinley declared “The Philippines are ours not to exploit, but to civilize, to develop, to educate, to train in the science of self-government.” In 1901, Woodrow Wilson, then still a professor at Princeton, echoed McKinley when he declared that though the USA had acquired the Philippines “almost accidentally,” it was “our duty” to impart to their people “our own principles of self-help.” But the USA still tried to refrain from becoming a global power. It was dragged into the First World War when the fate of Germany was almost sealed and entered the Second World War because of Pearl Harbor.

After 1945 the USA, while becoming, as it still is, the greatest military power in the world, saw it as its task the containment of communism. Yet it was not able to prevent Mao’s Red Army from talking over China, or to defeat the North Korean communists or to stop the Vietnamese communists from taking over the whole country, or even Fidel Castro turning to communism after establishing control over Cuba (only 150 km from Florida).

The USA played little part in the decolonization process of the 1950s and 1960s. Even the fall of communism in the USSR was due more to the communists themselves, under Gorbachev, and their failure to develop a prosperous consumer society. The evolution of China towards a relatively successful market economy labelled as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (another instance of exceptionalism) was also the work of internal forces.

Yet there is an American exceptionalism. It is not political, or military (though its military power is exceptional, or economic (though right now it is doing much better than Europe). Yes, what happens politically in Washington still matters more than what happen in Beijing. Yes, though a massive literature long suggested that American economic and financial power is declining, the USA still dominates the international economy: the dollar is still the main international currency (but for how long?) and this allows the United States to run the largest external debt in the world, and to have greater voting power in the World Bank and in the International Monetary Fund – but for how long? Its political system looks increasingly bizarre, so much so that the columnist Peter Baker wrote in the New York Times (5 October 2023) that “to many watching at home and abroad, the American way no longer seems to offer a case study in effective representative democracy. Instead, it has become an example of disarray and discord, one that rewards extremism, challenges norms and threatens to divide a polarized country even further.”

The most formidable American domination is in the field of popular culture, which, throughout the world, is shaped and influenced by American music, films, stories, and television serials. Underpinning such century-old domination is the strength of American software: Google, Microsoft, Facebook. None of this owes much to the activity of whoever sits in the White House or in Congress where disorder prevails, to the alarm of America’s allies.

Political disorder which did not prevent US Vice-President Kamala Harris from asserting, just before attending to the summit on Artificial Intelligence in England, that it would be the USA which would dictate the global rules on AI: “Let us be clear,” she declared, “when it comes to AI, America is a global leader. It is American companies that lead the world in AI innovation. It is America that can catalyze global action and build global consensus in a way that no other country can.”