I'm happy to announce that the official book launch at the Literature House in Oslo last week went well. The room was actually packed (don't people have better things to do on a Friday evening?) and we (I) had a lot of fun. The research director at the Nobel Institute, Asle Toje, commented on my book and former Washington correspondent for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), Joar Hoel Larsen, had funny things to say about Rudy Guiliani. A good night, all in all.
Since my book is in the "ridiculous academic" price range, the least I can do is publish a tiny excerpt from my Introduction. So, here it is:
How to Be an American
It’s
been our fate as a nation, not to have
ideologies
but to be one.
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American greatness or think them outdated.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 whom 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,” critics
thought.[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 one that 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 of 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 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.
***********************************************************
[1] Quoted in Hans Kohn, American Nationalism: An Interpretive Essay
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957), p. 13.
[2] The “birther” critique was one heard quite often in the 2008
election, which accused Barack Obama of being born in Kenya, not Hawaii. Not
being born in the United States makes one ineligible to run for president. See,
for example, Ben Smith and Byron Tau, “Birtherism: Where it all began,” Politico (April 22, 2011). URL: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53563.html.
[3] Brian Levy, “Today hosts Dick
Morris, who says people are debating whether Obama will be seen as ‘sleeper
agent,’” Media Matters for America (June
24, 2008). URL: http://mediamatters.org/print/research/2008/06/24/today-hosts-dick-morris-who-says-people-are-deb/143842
[7] Monica Crowley, “American Exceptionalism…” in The Washington
Times (July 1, 2009).
[12] Indeed, this has been
simultaneously the traditional lament on the part of realist historians and
political scientists as well as the proof that those very same realist theories
do a poor job of explaining U.S. foreign policy. Realists have consistently
criticized the adherence to “idealism” or ideology that is demonstrably present
in major foreign policy decisions such as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations
and the second Iraq war, for example. See for example Hans J. Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest: A critical
examination of American foreign policy (Washington, D.C.:
University Press of America, 1982); Robert Osgood, Ideals and
Self-Interest in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1953); Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994). For a critical overview of classical
realism, see Michael J. Smith, Realism
from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1986).
[13] See for example G. John
Ikenberry, After Victory (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Henry R. Nau, At Home Abroad:
Identity and Power in American Foreign Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2002); Jeffrey W. Legro, Rethinking the World (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2005); Ikenberry, Liberal
Order and Imperial Ambition (Malden, MA: Polity, 2006); Stewart Patrick, The Best Laid Plans: The Origins of American Multilateralism and the Dawn
of the Cold War (Lanham. MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).
[14] See for example Melvyn P. Leffler, “9/11 and
American Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic
History, 29(3), 2005, pp. 395-413; G. John Ikenberry, Anne-Marie
Slaughter, and Thomas J. Knock, The
Crisis in American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
[15] See for example, John G. Ruggie, “The Past as
Prologue? Interests, Identity, and American Foreign Policy,” International
Security, 21(4), 1997, pp. 89-125; Michael Desch, “America’s Liberal Illiberalism: The
Ideological Origins of Overreaction in U.S. Foreign Policy,” International Security, 32(3), 2007/08,
pp. 7-43.
