I agree with most of what my friend Dorian said about the Putin OP ED in the NYT. I don’t think however we should let the messenger preventive us from learning from the message. I have always disliked the idea of “American Exceptionalism.” While we have always talked the talk we have not always walked the walk – nothing exceptional about that. Many if not most of our current foreign policy problems are blow back from past actions. Iran comes to mind – the CIA’s coup against a democratically elected secular president empowering the tyrant the Shah of Iran. Passively enabling Saddam Hussein to use chemical weapons against the Iranians is yet another example. Not much exceptional there. Paul Pillar makes this observation:
The part of Putin’s piece that Americans perhaps found more irritating than any other was his final comment about American exceptionalism. Americans get especially upset about this sort of comment because it sounds to them like an affront to the very nature of America and not just particular American policies. Probably an extra annoyance was Putin’s final line invoking religion, especially coming from someone who used to work on behalf of godless communism.
But what Putin actually said here involved one of his most valid and valuable points. He said that encouraging exceptionalist thinking is dangerous because countries differ from each other on all sorts of dimensions, and there is no basis for saying that any one country’s differences sets it apart in a way that does not apply to any other countries. He was not impugning the motivation of exceptionalist thinking in the United States or anywhere else—he specifically said “whatever the motivation”—but instead was pointing out undesirable consequences of such thinking.
I don’t often agree with Rod Dreher but I think he nails it here:
I think this is right, and important. As I see it, the problems with “American exceptionalism” are 1) a tendency to believe that we Americans are immune to making the same mistakes other countries make because we believe too strongly in our own goodness; 2) a tendency to conceal our own foreign-policy motivations from ourselves beneath a veneer of moralism; and 3) tone-deafness to how our own foreign-policy actions appear to others, because we mean well.
So don’t ignore the message because of the messenger.