Earning It
By Anne-Marie Slaughter
Posted July 2007
Is it too late for America to win back its disappointed admirers? Not if
the United States returns to its founding ideals and finally puts to bed the
myth of "American exceptionalism" once and for all.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images News
Hard work: It's tough being an America-lover these days.
My friend Theo Sommer, former editor in chief of Germany's Die Zeit,
always says, "Underneath every America-hater is a disappointed America-lover."
The latest Pew polls would appear to bear him out; many of the most negative
attitudes toward the United States are in Europe, a continent of liberal
democracies committed to the same values of liberty, democracy, equality,
justice, and tolerance that the United States professes. And deep down, the
virulent antipathy to America in many Muslim countries may have similar roots.
In The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright describes how many young Arabs looked to
America in the first half of the 20th century as a beacon of anticolonialism
and then felt betrayed by U.S. support for Israel. These feelings of
disappointment and betrayal are actually encouraging, for they suggest that
scrubbing the tarnish from America's image is still possible. But winning back
the disappointed America-lovers will require more than just polish, or even a
change in specific policies. It will demand a much deeper shift in the way
America sees itself.
True, the next American president must begin by taking a number of
concrete steps. Words alone won't do it. I recommend five specific initiatives:
first, close Guantánamo and work with other nations on a shared understanding
of the rules for the interrogation of terrorism suspects; second, commit to
specific carbon emissions targets and a cap and trade system; third, ratify the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and negotiate with other nuclear states to begin
major cuts of nuclear arsenals in the spirit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty; fourth, make room at the Security Council table for emerging powers
such as India and Brazil, as well as Germany, Japan, two African nations, and
at least one major Muslim country at any given point; and finally, bring peace
between Israel and Palestine, or at least, in the words of the Clinton
administration, "get caught trying."
Yet even if the new president were to take all these steps, a substantial
part of the current anger at the United States would remain. Not because of who
we are, as President Bush likes to claim, but because of who we are not but
pretend to be. It is time, once and for all, to renounce the myth of American
exceptionalism. Americans should recover their own past and return to their
founders' vision-the vision of the very men who wrote the Declaration of
Independence that Americans celebrate today.
But weren't the founders the ones who originated the idea of American
exceptionalism? Not in the way most people use the phrase. Writing to a friend
in 1795, during both the French and the Dutch revolutions, Thomas Jefferson
proudly predicted that "this ball of liberty . . . is now so well in motion
that it will roll round the globe, at least the enlightened part of it, for
light & liberty go together. It is our glory that we first put it into motion."
For Jefferson and his fellow Founding Fathers, America was blessed with a
great destiny. But that destiny was to be the first country to enjoy the
benefits of representative and rights-regarding government, not the only.
America was exceptional then because of the state of the rest of the world. But
as other countries followed suit, they would create a community of which
America would be proud to be a member. And together all those countries would
uphold and spread universal values-the values of liberty, equality, democracy,
justice, and tolerance that grew out of Enlightenment notions of a common
humanity.
America stands for that possibility. It has shaped the aspirations of
countless brave men and women around the world seeking liberty, equality, and
self-government. But when America does and says things that make a mockery of
those aspirations-such as openly condoning torture, flouting international
treaties, and trampling civil liberties in the name of security-it betrays
those men and women and strengthens the hand of those who oppose them. Worse
still, it betrays the very idea of adherence to a set of values that can offer
meaning and purpose beyond pure calculations of self-interest. And when America
simultaneously insists that it is a moral beacon and seeks to reshape the world
into its own image, the resulting dissonance can ignite a smoldering
disappointment into flames of anger and hatred.
The good news, on the American side, is that understanding the American
experience as only one dimension of a global experience lightens a largely
self-imposed burden. America need not take it upon itself to promote "American
values" worldwide; it need only stand with its fellow liberal democracies to
demonstrate their success and to find ways to enable as many new countries as
possible to join the club. For the world, an America that no longer sees itself
as exceptional may once again become a country that can inspire as well as
infuriate, a country capable not only of paying a decent respect to the
opinions of mankind, but of earning it.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton
and the author of The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a
Dangerous World (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
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