Defusing the Syrian Chemical Warfare Crisis -- Part II: "American Exceptionalism" Redux

If there was a jarring note to the week’s dramatic diplomatic developments, it lay in the exchanges between Presidents Obama and Putin over an assertion in Obama’s Tuesday speech that acting against Syria reflected America’s sense of exceptionalism:  “America,” President Obama said, “is not the world’s policeman. Terrible things happen across the globe, and it is beyond our means to right every wrong. But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional.” [Italics mine].

Putin jumped on the use of the term “exceptional,”  concluding his op-ed remarks with the statement: “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”

Interestingly, Secretary of State Kerry’s father Richard, who died in 2000, was deeply concerned about the temptation of American politicians to wrap themselves and their actions in a mantle of American exceptionalism, and wrote a thoughtful book about it.

Dick Kerry was a neighbor and friend. We would meet weekly over fish chowder to discuss politics from the local level to the global.

He had served in the Army Air Corps in World War II, and became a lawyer and Foreign Service officer after the war, serving in Washington, Berlin, and Oslo during the early days of the Cold War. My Washington service as a Congressional aide and in the State Department and Arms Control Agency overlapped his for a few years.  

We had many friends in common, and shared many ideas, including the notion that the United States was treading a dangerous path in foreign affairs, particularly after the fall of Communism.

As the Cold War ended, Kerry worried that a longstanding American tendency to judge global problems through American eyes alone would be hard to resist in an era when we had no natural enemies and a near monopoly on military outreach and striking power. We were no longer just one of the big boys on the block; we were the only one. Kerry saw great dangers in this new American monopoly of power, and worried about the day that such power might not be matched with the wisdom to recognize the concerns and priorities of allies and other governments.

In 1990 he put these ideas together in a book he entitled The Star Spangled Mirror. Its title captures the essence of its message.

The idea that America has a mission to straighten out the world is not new. Almost since the nation was founded, America’s leaders have toyed with the view that the rest of the world ought to be like us.   If other nations failed to share our goals, support our initiatives, or join in our prejudices, they were on the wrong track, and needed correcting.  We tended to look for our mirror image in others’ actions and policies; where we failed to see our star-spangled reflection, the image was flawed.

Thomas Jefferson declared that America should be “a standing monument and example” which would “ameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe,” a virtuous notion that helped rationalize America’s westward expansion and interventionist policies for the next century.  President Monroe declared that the Western Hemisphere was ours to control; William McKinley, encouraged by Mark Hanna, the Karl Rove of his day, launched an imperial war against Spain and managed to get us bogged down in the Philippines for decades. Woodrow Wilson, hoping to sell the League of Nations to a wary American public, elevated America’s global perspective from manifest destiny to a harmonious world based on democratic universalism: the more the world was patterned on American ideals, the better the chances for lasting peace would be. 

Thus while most American presidents have too often subscribed to the view that our way to run the world is the only right way, only a few have recognized --  infrequently at that -- that we are part of a larger global system, where we must take the concerns and interests of other nations into account and moderate our policies accordingly.

The urge to cry “We’re Number One” is hard to suppress, but we should. Not only is it unfortunately true that the United States is not, in fact, number one in many important ways (e.g., affordable health care or universal public education) it is number one in, among other measurements, military spending, income disparity, obesity, prison incarceration, divorce rate, drug use, gun ownership and homicide and suicide by firearms.

We have much to be proud of as Americans; and we are indeed exceptional in that we have managed to survive as a nation for more than 230 years, and have been able to function as a heterogeneous society made up of many cultures -- albeit wracked by the consequences of the inclusion of slavery in the Constitution that led to a Civil War every bit as bloody as Syria's; we are still struggling more than 150 years later to create equal opportunity for all Americans.  

We also live in an exceptionally beautiful land, as anyone who has driven across it can attest.

But that's not the point. We cannot afford to alienate the rest of the world by claiming some sort of moral superiority over all others, as President Obama appeared to assert in his speech, sounding hardly different from President George W. Bush, who told author Bob Woodward that it was his “duty to free the Iraqi people.”

Putin's pious observations about the civil war in Syria are hypocritical to say the least, given the years of military assistance Russia has given the Assad regime. His assertion that the rebels, not Assad, had been responsible for the gas attacks in August is ludicrous in the face of persuasive evidence from Human Rights Watch observers and apparently from considerable US intelligence sources. It is expected that the UN teams that have been investigating the attacks will reach the same conclusion. But Putin was right about the need to view other countries as no less entitled to respect than one's own, and right too, if less than diplomatic, about the impropriety of Obama's assertions of exceptionalism and the implication that we occupy morally higher ground because if it.  
President Obama would have been wiser to drop the last two sentences in his speech last Tuesday. And I hope that Secretary Kerry has the chance to remind the President of his own father’s warning from time to time.