On our minds: Changing American attitudes about their country's role in the world. |
The End of American Crusaderism? |
 | | Taliban fighters watching as a C-17 military transport plane left Kabul, Afghanistan, at sunset on Monday.Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times |
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We may, someday soon, look back with puzzlement at the time in which Americans believed their country was so innately superior, so ordained with special virtue — so exceptional — that it was their right and responsibility to dictate affairs overseas. |
There have been indications for years that belief in American exceptionalism is declining. Now, the latest report from a four-year study by the Eurasia Group Foundation, tracking American attitudes on foreign policy matters, suggests that exceptionalism could end outright — and, with it, perhaps even the era of America as global crusader. |
On a host of issues, the study found declining support for all that exceptionalism implies: desire for open-ended military commitments, faith in armed force to resolve complex problems, pressure on presidents to maintain global dominance. Americans increasingly support the use of diplomacy abroad, coming to terms with adversaries like Iran or China rather than confronting them, and cooperating on shared challenges like climate change. |
Perhaps most telling: Americans seem more and more skeptical about not only whether the U.S. can or should act as the self-appointed global leader, but also whether it has a right to do so at all. This shows up in several results, but most telling may be how Americans answer when asked whether they see the U.S. as "an exceptional nation." |
Among Americans over age 60, nearly 80 percent say yes. For those age 45 to 60, it's about 70 percent. Age 30 to 44, just over 50 percent say that is the case. But, for those age 18 to 29, only 40 percent, with the other 60 percent affirmatively stating that the U.S. is "not an exceptional nation." A steady and sharp decline by age. |
This shift is often attributed to dissolution with 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, as the study makes clear, this is a factor but not quite what's going on. We're not seeing the onset of American exhaustion so much as the ebbing of exceptionalist beliefs that — while long misperceived as innate and eternal — were always tied to one-off events and therefore most likely to fade with time. |
The story of American exceptionalism is often mistold as beginning with Puritanism, World War II or the Cold War. In fact, as the historian James W. Ceasar documents in a comprehensive history, it originated around 1900 amid America's war with Spain, as justification for seizing several Spanish colonies. |
Taking control of Puerto Rico, the Philippines and others did not qualify as imperialism, a senator from Indiana named Albert Beveridge argued in a seminal speech, because God had "marked the American people as his chosen nation to finally lead in the redemption of the world." |
That ideology was solidified by the first world war. President Woodrow Wilson sold a skeptical public on intervening in what Americans saw as a messy European matter by saying that the U.S. had been ordained by God with a special mission to make the world "safe for democracy" and to spread "the principles that gave her birth and happiness." |
The back-to-back wars instilled what Mr. Ceasar called "America's self-designation as a special nation endowed with a great historical task." The apocalyptic stakes of World War II and the ideological charge of the Cold War, in which U.S. leaders portrayed American hegemony as righteous and predestined, deepened this belief into something like a civic religion. By the 1990s, victory in the Cold War, and then against a handful of small countries such as Serbia and Panama, made exceptionalism's provisions a matter of consensus. |
The first blow to "exceptionalism" came in the 2000s, in backlash to the war in Iraq, which raised doubts over whether American power was really so special. Because the war became a partisan issue, so did exceptionalism, with belief fading somewhat for Democrats. But it remained closely enough held by the median voter that even then-President Barack Obama, an impassioned critic of interventionism, once said, "My entire career has been a testimony to American exceptionalism." |
Donald J. Trump's presidency appears to have accelerated exceptionalism's decline among Americans in two important ways. First, his presidency led to the plummeting of Americans' faith in both U.S. democracy and the quality of American society. And, second, he dislodged exceptionalism from the grips of partisanship. Mr. Trump himself rejected exceptionalism's precepts of American power as morally righteous, for example by saying to an interviewer who challenged his praise of Russia's leaders: "We've got a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent?" This gave conservative voters permission to question exceptionalism themselves, as many were already doing by the end of the Iraq war. |
Attitudes toward the withdrawal from Afghanistan, as captured in the Eurasia Group study, drive home how much has changed. Only 18.6 percent agreed that leaving the country "hurt America's reputation and credibility as a global leader" — the answer most closely reflecting the exceptionalist belief that the world relies on open-ended American interventions to keep it spinning. The most popular view of the withdrawal, with twice the level of support, was that the U.S. "had a failed mission from the start" and should not be "in the business of nation-building." |
In other words, the study suggests that Americans see the war as not just a failure but also a rebuke to the exceptionalist notions that have guided U.S. foreign policy for nearly 100 years. |
But this is not the same as isolationism or a desire to withdraw from the world. Support for diplomatic engagement abroad is actually growing, as well as for international cooperation for issues like the fight against climate change. Younger Americans are less supportive of military interventions or ideological missions like "defending democracy around the world," but they are more supportive of "reinforcing global economic integration." |
Consider how Americans responded when asked how the U.S. should respond to overseas humanitarian crises. The least popular answer was that the U.S. should use its influence and military might to "stop human rights abuses around the globe." But that doesn't mean Americans are growing more isolationist; the number of respondents who said that the U.S. should fix its own problems at home before getting involved abroad has actually declined. Rather, the most popular answer by far was for Washington to support cooperative institutions like the U.N. in handling crises. |
There is a conventional wisdom that Americans respond to economic crises or international setbacks by turning inward for a time. But this implies that exceptionalist attitudes are still the default to which Americans will, in time, naturally revert. The Eurasia Group study is another data point suggesting that exceptionalism is not the norm at all, but a 120-year digression that may already face an inevitable decline. |
"In a lot of ways, the public's views of the so-called global War on Terror have remained stable over time," the study's authors write. "What reads as war weariness might simply be journalists' newfound attention to an enduring public skepticism of — if not longstanding opposition to — America's wars in the Middle East." |
In Müller's account, the problem is not that voters have become disaffected from democracy, though that is a common diagnosis. Instead, it's that the intermediary institutions that structured our democracies, linking voters to power-holders, have vanished. The fracturing of establishment parties — that is, the decline of the mass center-right and center-left parties of the postwar years and the rise of social media — have made these institutions more inclusive. At the same time, it is easier now than ever before to found one's own party. With the rise of primaries within political parties, the pathway to candidacies within many existing parties is more open than ever before. Likewise, it has never been easier to communicate directly with fellow citizens, through Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. But the decline of gatekeeping institutions has paradoxically also opened the door to demagogues and populist outsiders. |
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