President Donald Trump loves to tell us how great America is. “There is no nation like our nation,” he said in his inaugural address. “No one comes close.” In his recent address to Congress, he said America will “forge” the “most dominant civilization ever to exist on the face of this Earth.”
Look more carefully, however, and it becomes clear that the exceptionalism that drives his talk is more dangerous than hopeful.
Asked to identify today’s greatest threats, many people would cite the wars in Israel and Ukraine; others would talk about climate change. But Trump’s endless boasting about our near-universal belief that America is exceptional is as dangerous as any of these. Probably more so.
Many other “certainties” have lost their hold on public thinking in recent decades: ideas about climate change, race, abortion, LGBTQ+ rights. But the belief that Americans are an exceptional people, called to lead the world, remains unassailable.
Liberals and conservatives alike still accept John F. Kennedy’s declaration in his 1961 inaugural address that we are the “shining city on a hill,” destined to defend the world against forces of evil.
One reason for the persistence of that conviction is the endless repetition of Puritan John Winthrop’s 17th century sermon from which JFK — and later Ronald Reagan — drew this image. By the 19th century, the “city on a hill” trope had taken root; by the mid-1900s, it had become doctrine.
Another reason is spiritual; it feels good to be superior. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot wrote that “the United States is . . . a religion,” peopled by those who see themselves called by God to lift others “from their darkness.” Another British journalist told a class of mine that America is not a “country” bound together by a common past but an “ideology,” with people united by documents like the Constitution rather than by geography or a shared past.
So, how can a belief that serves so many groups so well be dangerous?
The fundamental answer is simple: Exceptionalist thinking is based on false premises, which blind us to our frailties, make it hard to understand how the rest of the world sees us, and prevent clear-headed decision making. They enable the arms industry to do its work largely undetected, or at least unchallenged, and render practical diplomacy difficult, sometimes impossible. And those very things invite serious mistakes, and war.
Simplistic policies make tough situations harder
History provides endless examples of exceptionalist beliefs causing disaster. As a historian of Japan, I shiver when I read the 1920s speeches of the military intellectual Ishiwara Kanji, who believed that because Japan was superior, the kami or gods had willed it to win humankind’s “final war” and usher in a millennium of global prosperity. It was a short step from that belief to Pearl Harbor.
Shortly after World War II, a similar story, with Communists as the villains, prompted the United States to support a massacre of perhaps 30,000 people in Korea’s southern island of Jeju while the media looked away. In the decades that followed, exceptionalist readings of America’s moral position led us to depose regimes in Iran (1953) and Chile (1970) and launch disastrous wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
Today, the myth underlies simplistic good-guy-bad-buy policies in the Middle East, Ukraine, and Asia, policies that make nuanced solutions to complex situations forbiddingly difficult. Ultimately, such thinking grows ever more likely to ignite nuclear war in any of those regions.
The point of this is not to say America should withdraw itself from the world’s danger zones, nor that it should stop being a force for good.
It is to make it clear that triumphalist rhetoric makes it impossible to see things, including ourselves, as they really are. And that invites conflicts that kill people — by the tens or hundreds of thousands.
Can the narrative be changed? Can we learn to see ourselves and others in the nuanced, honest ways necessary for peace? I am not optimistic. But the long-term survival of humankind depends on it. If we do not take up this conversation now, we may not get another chance.
James Huffman is the Hirt Professor of History emeritus at Wittenberg University and lives in Chicago. He has published nine books, including “Japan in World History.”
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