Opinion | American exceptionalism: how will next president steer foreign policy?

From the liberal internationalists, to the ‘retrenchers’ who want to pull back, and the isolationist ‘American firsters’, whichever approach prevails will strongly affect the conflicts in Europe, Asia and the Middle East

Reading Time:4 minutes

Published: 5:30am, 18 Dec 2023

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, three broad camps are visible in America’s debate over how the United States should relate to the rest of the world: the liberal internationalists who have dominated since World War II; the “retrenchers” who want to pull back from some alliances and institutions; and the “America firsters” who take a narrow, sometimes isolationist, view of America’s role in the world.

Americans have long seen their country as morally exceptional. Stanley Hoffmann, a French-American intellectual, said that while countries tend to consider themselves unique, France and the US stood out in believing their values were universal. France, however, was limited by the balance of power in Europe, and thus could not pursue its universalist ambitions fully. Only the US had the power to do that.

The point is not that Americans are morally superior; it is that many Americans want to believe their country is a force for good. Realists have long complained that this moralism in American foreign policy interferes with a clear analysis of power.

Yet America’s liberal political culture has made a huge difference to the liberal international order that has existed since the second world war. Today’s world would look very different if Hitler had emerged victorious or if Stalin’s Soviet Union had prevailed in the Cold War.

American exceptionalism has three main sources. Since 1945, the dominant one has been the legacy of the Enlightenment, specifically the liberal ideas espoused by America’s founders.

As president John F. Kennedy put it: “The ‘magic power’ on our side is the desire of every person to be free, of every nation to be independent … It is because I believe our system is more in keeping with the fundamentals of human nature that I believe we are ultimately going to be successful.” Enlightenment liberalism holds such rights to be universal, not limited to the US.

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