The idea of American exceptionalism is deeply set in American culture and the institutions of foreign policy. We are addicted to an inflated self-image. How sadly appropriate, alas, to have a megalomaniac as president to proclaim America’s continued dominance.
As many American historians have noted, American exceptionalism is deeply intertwined in America’s history, or at least in one telling of it. When the first pilgrims arrived, they were not merely looking to establish a colony in the New World (which they regarded as “new” since they left the native Americans out of the accounting). They were establishing a “city upon the hill.” America would be the new Promised Land.
This messianic vision provided the energy and vision to overcome the unimaginable difficulties of settling a new frontier thousands of miles from the European homelands. The European settlers faced famine and distance, resistance from indigenous populations, wars between the European powers, and of course growing tensions between the colonizers and the imperial governments back in Europe. At every turn, they called on Providence for their salvation, and at each victory, they gave credit to the Lord for supporting his new chosen people. America’s success became divine success. America’s strength became the proof of its divine mission in the world. In this, the Protestant settlers of New England followed the teachings of John Calvin: “There is no question that riches should be the portion of the godly rather than the wicked, for godliness hath the promise in this life as well as the life to come.”1
The settlers, largely the descendants of the English and other peoples of the British Isles, arrived in the early seventeenth century at their Atlantic beachheads prepared to fight to stay, and then in God’s name to spread across the American continent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the world in the twentieth century. In more than 250 years of almost continuous expansionist wars and bold investments in farms, factories, and infrastructure, Americans interpreted their successes as proof of the divinity of their cause.
In their exceptionalism, Americans were surely tutored by their English cousins, whose own global grandeur preceded America’s global dominance by more than a century. For at least a century (roughly from 1815 to 1914), Britain seemed to be blessed with divine backing for true global dominance. Americans, many of them heirs to the same culture, language, and ethnicity, could look on with awe at the ever-expanding British Empire, no doubt with the secret hope, perhaps even expectation, that someday that empire would be their own.
American messianism revealed itself in the formative moments of the United States. It provided the fuel for the original settlements and for two centuries of war against native communities that stood in the ways of claims to the land and its natural wealth. It was carried in Lincoln’s description of America as “the last best hope of Earth,” even though it was the United States alone in the world that required a civil war to end slavery. It was epitomized by the idea of America’s Manifest Destiny to occupy the lands between the oceans, notwithstanding the claims of other countries (such as Mexico) or the rights of the indigenous populations. It fueled the hubristic, yet wildly successful, Monroe Doctrine, by which a weak, start-up nation warned the great European powers to desist from meddling in the Americas.
Historians have noted that every major war of the United States has been cloaked in the language of America’s divine mission to deliver not only success for itself but global salvation. At the end of the nineteenth century, just after the United States had fulfilled its “destiny” of ruling North America from ocean to ocean, the nation turned to overseas empire building. In 1898, it went to war against Spain, not to grab Spain’s colonies but to liberate them (or so it claimed); 120 years later, the conquered lands—Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—continue to bear the scars of U.S. intervention. Few residents of those countries would subscribe to the American view that they had been liberated by the United States.
In the twentieth century, the interventions abroad would be far larger and far more consequential for global history. On dozens of occasions, the United States sent its military into action in the Americas to overthrow governments, install pliant ones, grab territories (such as the Panama Canal Zone), secure investments in mines, oil, or farmlands, or suppress rebellions deemed to be hostile to American public or private interests. John Coatsworth has documented an astounding forty-one instances of U.S.-led “regime change” in the Americas, a pattern that would eventually be carried over to Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.2 These are violent, extra-constitutional overthrows of foreign governments by the United States through a variety of means including wars, coups, assassinations, electoral manipulation, acts of provocation, and manufactured protests and mass unrest. Table 2.1 summarizes Coatsworth’s remarkable findings, a careful undertaking that should be carried out systematically by specialists for all the world’s regions, since America’s regime-change operations have occurred not only in Latin America but also in dozens more cases in Asia, Europe, and Africa.
TABLE 2.1 Selected U.S. Interventions in Latin America, 1898–2004
| Direct Interventions: Military/CIA activity that changed governments |
| Cuba |
1898–1902 |
Spanish-American War |
| |
1906–1909 |
United States ousts elected president Tomás Estrada Palma; occupation regime |
| |
1917–1923 |
U.S. reoccupation, gradual withdrawal |
| Dominican Republic |
1916–1924 |
U.S. occupation |
| |
1961 |
Assassination of President Trujillo |
| |
1965 |
U.S. armed forces occupy Santo Domingo |
| Grenada |
1983 |
U.S. armed forces occupy island, oust government |
| Guatemala |
1954 |
C.I.A.-organized armed force ousts President Arbenz |
| Haiti |
1915–1934 |
U.S. occupation |
| |
1994 |
U.S. troops restore constitutional government |
| Mexico |
1914 |
Veracruz occupied; United States allows rebels to buy arms |
| Nicaragua |
1910 |
Troops to Corinto and Bluefields during revolt |
| |
1912–1925 |
U.S. occupation |
| |
1926–1933 |
U.S. occupation |
| |
1981–1990 |
Contra war; then support for opposition in election |
| Panama |
1903–1914 |
U.S. troops secure protectorate, canal |
| |
1989 |
U.S. armed forces occupy nation |
| Indirect Interventions: Government/regime changes in which the United States was decisive |
| Bolivia |
1964 |
Military coup ousts elected president Paz Estenssoro |
| |
1971 |
Military coup ousts General Torres |
| Brazil |
1964 |
Military coup ousts elected president João Goulart |
| Chile |
1973 |
Coup ousts elected president Salvador Allende |
| |
1988–1989 |
Aid to anti-Pinochet opposition |
| Cuba |
1933 |
United States abandons support for President Machado |
| |
1934 |
United States sponsors coup by Colonel Batista to oust President Grau |
| Dominican Republic |
1914 |
United States secures ouster of General José Bordas |
| |
1963 |
Coup ousts elected president Juan Bosch |
| El Salvador |
1961 |
Coup ousts reformist civil-military junta |
| |
1979 |
Coup ousts General Humberto Romero |
| |
1980 |
United States creates and aids new Christian Democratic junta |
| Guatemala |
1963 |
United States supports coup against elected president Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes |
| |
1982 |
United States supports coup against General Lucas Garcia |
| |
1983 |
United States supports coup against General Rios Montt |
| Guyana |
1953 |
CIA aids strikes; government is ousted |
| Honduras |
1963 |
Military coup ousts elected president Villeda Morales |
| Mexico |
1913 |
U.S. Ambassador H. L. Wilson organizes coup against President Madero |
| Nicaragua |
1909 |
Support for rebels against Zelaya government |
| |
1979 |
United States pressures President Somoza to leave |
| Panama |
1941 |
United States supports coup ousting elected president Arnulfo Arias |
| |
1949 |
United States supports coup ousting constitutional government of President Chanís |
| |
1969 |
United States supports coup by Genral Torrijos |
America’s late entry into World War I was another messianic adventure with startling and unanticipated consequences for the world. When an unprecedented, industrial-scale bloodletting exploded in Europe in August 1914, the American public and its leaders generally urged the United States to stay clear of the European carnage. President Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection in 1916 on a platform to keep the United States out of war. Yet by 1917, Wilson decided that America’s great economic and military power could be used not only to end the war but also to end all wars, a case of American grandiosity in action.
Before the U.S. intervention, the European combatants were locked in a grinding stalemate, one that might have ended in a truce without victor or vanquished. Yet America tilted the outcome to an outright victory by Britain and France over Germany and Austria. The idea of a peace without victors, an ostensible objective of the U.S. intervention, turned into the very opposite, a decisive defeat of the Hohenzollern (German) and Austro-Hungarian empires by France, Britain, and the United States that would subsequently result in a failed peace, economic chaos, the rise of Hitler, and a second world war one generation later. Americans tend to view the U.S. intervention in World War I as a success, but historians have explained with care the largely inadvertent damage caused by America’s entry into the war.3
The two world wars and a Great Depression between 1914 and 1945 crippled Europe, and by 1950, the North Atlantic leadership had passed to the United States. America’s preeminence in war, peace, and the global economy was evident. U.S. industry became the arsenal of democracy, and Washington financed the war, but on terms that would ensure U.S. global economic dominance after the war. Alone among the great powers, America had come through the war unscathed on home territory (aside from the one-day attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941).
In 1941, Time magazine editor Henry Luce proclaimed the American Century, the moniker under which the United States would exercise global leadership.4 Americans quickly bought into the idea. It fit with a long-standing U.S. narrative: the United States as the exceptional country. And at the time, it was true. America’s dominance by 1945 is hard to overstate. American industry had expanded to unprecedented dimensions, with the gross domestic product (GDP) in 1945 almost double that of 1939. As of 1950, the United States accounted for 27 percent of the world economy, compared with approximately 26 percent for Western Europe, 9 percent for the Soviet Union, and just 5 percent for China.
World War II had been the progenitor of breathtaking American innovations in science and technology, propelled by the demands of war: radar, sonar, ballistics, aeronautics, computers, semiconductors, cybernetics (human-machine interactions), applied mathematics, nuclear physics, chemistry, pharmaceuticals, metallurgy, and more. Europe’s pre-Hitler scientific leadership arrived in the United States, refugee by refugee. The development of the atomic bomb was certainly the most visible symbol of the new cutting-edge physics harnessed to national power. But there were countless other crucial breakthroughs in science-based technology, as well as the realization that science-led development would be the key to economic advancement and to national security in the decades ahead.
By 1950, the United States had achieved unrivaled global leadership. It towered as perhaps the most powerful nation in world history. Although the Soviet Union, too, had nuclear arms after 1949, America’s economic and technological preeminence in the civilian economy was unassailable. According to one estimate, by historian Angus Maddison, America’s per capita GDP was 3.4 times that of the Soviet Union as of 1950.
The American Century was just getting started. How, then, could anyone doubt that Providence was on the side of the Americans, whose country had started as a tiny settlement hugging the Atlantic coast, spread across a continent, then across the oceans, and then across the world? (Of course that same delusion had gripped countless great powers before: Rome, Britain, Napoleon’s France, China’s Middle Kingdom, and many others).
It’s worth reflecting on one important skeptical voice at midcentury, somebody who had thought a thing or two about God’s purpose. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, at the moment of America’s rise to global preeminence, had a foreboding that America’s power would be its comeuppance, that America could be blinded by its might to its limitations, and even to right from wrong. Niebuhr warned Americans not to believe in their omniscience and omnipotence.5 He warned about hubris, arrogance, and corruption by power and wealth as fundamental human traits and weaknesses. He worried that America’s traditional messianism, its sense of carrying forward God’s mission, and its easy equation of wealth with godliness would prove to be its undoing.
In short, Niebuhr presciently warned against the arrogance that came to be part and parcel of American overseas militarism after World War II. Niebuhr noted that the Calvinist credo that wealth is a sign of God’s providence created an American culture “which makes ‘living standards’ the final norm of the good life” and “which regards the perfection of techniques [technology] as the guarantor of every cultural as well as of every social-moral value.”6 Niebuhr gave this wise warning, one that was not heeded by American leaders in future generations:
Today the success of America in world politics depends on its ability to establish community with many nations, despite the hazards created by pride of power on the one hand and the envy of the weak on the other…[O]ur success in world politics necessitates a disavowal of the pretentious elements in our original dream, and a recognition of the values and virtues which enter into history in unpredictable ways.7
The United States assumed postwar leadership in several fundamental ways. Most creatively, and thanks to the political genius and vision of Franklin Roosevelt, the United States led the design and launch of the new United Nations bodies, including the Bretton Woods Institutions (World Bank and International Monetary Fund), the UN agencies (such as the World Health Organization), and other regional institutions. Beginning with Roosevelt’s administration and continuing with Truman’s, the United States also came to dominate global finance, providing large-scale development aid, official loans, and private capital investments for economic development. American companies, in the lead in new technologies, invested around the world. The dollar decisively replaced the pound sterling at the center of international finance and payments.
Yet internationalism was also matched by building a new security state. The United States invested heavily in the military and security agencies, eventually building a massive nuclear arsenal, hundreds of military bases around the world, several powerful intelligence agencies including the CIA, and military alliances to ensure continued U.S. dominance.
From 1945 to 1991, U.S. foreign policy was structured to prevail in the Cold War. Though the United States dominated the world economy, the communist bloc led by the Soviet Union formed a rival ideology and a geopolitical threat. “Containment” of the Soviet Union and of the spread of communism became the prevailing dogma, yet the concept was interpreted in three very different ways. U.S. exceptionalists viewed the Soviet Union as an incorrigible superpower intent on world domination, with the United States as the ultimate bulwark of global freedom. U.S. realists viewed containment in more traditional balance-of-power terms. Realists had no doubt that the Soviet Union would exploit Western political or military weaknesses where possible, but they did not believe that the Soviet Union was a juggernaut intent on taking over the world. U.S. internationalists, originally led by FDR himself, but then mainly on the U.S. political left, believed that the two blocs could not only coexist peacefully but also cooperate in areas of science, culture, and economic development. This view was rarely ascendant in U.S. foreign policy, except in brief periods such as 1963, when the United States and the Soviet Union concluded the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and during periods of détente under Nixon, Ford, and Carter.
It is notable that the conceptual father of containment, George Kennan, bemoaned the exceptionalist interpretation, believing it to be dangerously hubristic, a naïve assertion of America’s unique goodness and quest for global military dominance that was dangerous, unnecessary, and unachievable. In his 1957 BBC Reith Lectures, just a few years into the containment policy, Kennan put forward the proposition that a peace settlement regarding Germany, one that recognized Soviet security concerns, could actually remove the most important causes of the Cold War:
I would know of no basic issues of genuine gravity between Russia and the West other than those arising directly from the manner in which the recent world war was allowed to come to an end. I am referring here particularly to the fact that the authority of a united German Government was expunged on the territory of Germany itself and throughout large areas of Eastern Europe, and the armies of the Soviet Union and the Western democracies were permitted to meet in the middle of this territory and to take control of it, before there was any adequate agreement among them as to its future permanent status.8
Kennan urged the West to consider one direction for a possible peaceful resolution: the unification of Germany outside of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), thereby allowing for the mutual withdrawal from Germany of both NATO troops (in West Germany) and Soviet troops (in East Germany). Such compromise ideas found little support in the U.S. foreign policy community, and Kennan, though author of the original containment concept, found himself mostly outside of the mainstream after the mid-1950s.
The postwar U.S. security state had three faces. The public face included the United Nations linkages and the formal alliances like NATO, designed to keep the peace and to defend against Soviet aggression. The NATO alliance was established in 1949 mainly to defend against a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, which was formed in 1949 out of the zones of military occupation by the United States, Britain, and France, became a NATO member in 1955, largely closing the door on a settlement of World War II along the lines that Kennan envisaged. The first secretary-general of NATO, Lord Ismay, famously declared that the purpose of NATO was “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” This meant that NATO would commit the United States to the defense of Western Europe, would prevent a Soviet invasion, and would subordinate German military and industrial might to a larger, U.S.-led alliance.
The public face of the security state largely maintained an internationalist perspective, aligning the United States with the United Nations and its new institutions to help promote cooperation when that could be established. Thus, the United States was leader of the “free world” (backed by the NATO alliance) as well as the leader of global cooperation through the UN institutions and agencies. Yet when the United States faced limits within the UN—for example, when opposed by the Soviet Union and its allies—the United States was hardly shy about asserting national prerogatives despite UN opposition.
A second, more shrouded face, was in the contested postcolonial world. Would the newly independent countries swing toward the United States or the Soviet Union? Open warfare, secret CIA operations including regime changes and assassinations of foreign leaders, and bribes and other inducements were used to keep countries in the U.S. camp. The CIA, created in 1947, became a secret army of the U.S. president, carrying out coups, assassinations, and destabilization operations against governments deemed hostile to U.S. security interests. Alas, the CIA not only poisoned local politics in places where it intervened but also poisoned the rule of law in the United States, with presidents becoming knowing accomplices to murder and mayhem.
The third face was the most cynical of the three. Even when Soviet influence was nowhere to be seen, American interests might be at stake, as when a reform-minded government in Guatemala in the early 1950s decided on land reform to benefit the landless peasants. That was quite enough of a threat for the American company United Fruit International, which called its U.S. law firm Sullivan and Cromwell in 1954 to mobilize its former associates John Foster Dulles (U.S. secretary of state) and Allen Dulles (director of the CIA). Soon enough, Guatemala’s reform-minded leader, Jacobo Arbenz, was overthrown. And Guatemala was hardly alone. With God on its side, the United States would overthrow dozens of leaders over the coming decades, many by outright assassination, and many in the pursuit of oil, farmlands, and other commercial benefits rather than anything resembling true national security.
What has been the legacy of these three facets of the U.S. security state? The balance sheet is mixed at best, often quite grim, and in recent years decidedly negative.
The most positive part of the new security arrangements, harnessing the United States to the United Nations, lasted for perhaps twenty years. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy gave considerable focus and support to the United Nations and backed its nascent institutions. Of course, all three also unleashed countless acts of aggression and covert operations wholly contrary to the UN Charter. Yet by the time of President Nixon, even the priority given to UN decision making began to wane. Presidents generally sought UN approval when they could get it and acted without it when they could not, with variations on this theme across U.S. administrations. The internationalists, who had been led by Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of the UN, gradually lost their hold on U.S. foreign policy. They believed that the Cold War could be largely avoided by recognizing the Soviet Union’s valid security needs (such as a peace agreement with Germany), yet this more cooperative view was never really put to the test.
America’s core military alliances, with NATO, Japan, Korea, and others, mostly kept the peace, but with the near-miracle of dodging several close brushes with nuclear war caused by blunders, saber-rattling, misunderstandings, bluffs, and false alarms. The world was saved, on several occasions, by sheer dumb luck and by a few people who had more sense than the “sophisticated” security systems in which they were embedded.
NATO’s role after the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union has been far more problematic. Despite the end of NATO’s core mission—to protect Western Europe from a Soviet invasion—NATO not only stayed in existence but also expanded to the east toward Russia, sounding alarm bells in Russia and stoking a new Cold War. NATO forces bombed a European capital (Belgrade) in 1999 and flew combat missions in Libya in 2011 to topple Moammar Khadafy, giving rise to the accusations of dangerous NATO “mission creep” in the service of American military dominance.
The proxy wars worked out far worse. The United States has been in almost nonstop war since 1945. When facing the Soviet Union, every local fluctuation of power, every war of national liberation, every civil war, was viewed by the U.S. security state through the Cold War lens. Would a victory by side A or side B be better for the United States or the Soviet Union? Suddenly, the United States decided it had vital stakes in every local conflict, whether in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the 1950s–1970s, Central America in the 1980s, Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, the Balkans in the 1990s, or the Middle East almost continuously from the 1970s onward. America notoriously overestimated the unity of “global communism,” as if every self-proclaimed Marxist state or revolutionary faction in the world was taking direct orders from Moscow.
There is one overriding lesson from all these proxy wars: No superpower wins, but the locals inevitably lose, and lose badly. Millions have died at U.S. hands, with very little recognition by Americans of the carnage they are creating. Most recently, America’s hand in the Syrian war, led secretly by the CIA in partnership with Saudi Arabia, has been disastrous for Syria. Ten million Syrians have been displaced and hundreds of thousands have died, with no benefit for Syria’s long-term governance. Yet, despite America’s devastating role in Syria, most Americans would likely answer that the United States hasn’t even been at war in Syria, since their newspapers did not cover the covert CIA-Saudi activities.
The third face—the secretive, self-serving actions by the United States to defend U.S. commercial interests—has had a very bad yet predictable habit of returning to bite us. Americans have repeatedly overthrown governments for American financial convenience only to be thrown out later by a subsequent turn of politics. America’s repeated backing for dictatorships who defend U.S. business interests ends up being what is called an “obsolescing bargain,” one that may start well (for narrow U.S. commercial interests) but end badly for the United States in the longer term.
Think of America’s cynical overthrow of Iran’s prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953, in order to defend British and U.S. claims to Iran’s oil. The U.S. installed the Shah of Iran, who ruled with his secret police until 1979. After that, the United States predictably and understandably became the Great Satan for the Iranian Revolution that followed. Or think of America’s backing of the corrupt despot Batista in Cuba, followed by the Cuban Revolution. The list of such blowbacks is long indeed, as I’ll explore in further detail in chapter 6.
American exceptionalism turned especially destructive after the end of the Cold War. Since 1992, the United States has fought several devastating wars—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere—without achieving the political outcomes it sought. The link between these wars and the end of the Cold War is not incidental. Former NATO commander Wesley Clark spelled out the linkage in several books and interviews. After the first Gulf War in 1991, General Clark dropped into the Pentagon to see Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense for policy at the time. Wolfowitz told Clark that “we did learn one thing that’s very important” from the Gulf War:
With the end of the Cold War, we can now use our military with impunity. The Soviets won’t come in to block us. And we’ve got five, maybe 10, years to clean up these old Soviet surrogate regimes like Iraq and Syria before the next superpower emerges to challenge us…We could have a little more time, but no one really knows.9
Here was the exceptionalist agenda in the hands of a new generation of hard-liners (Wolfowitz, his boss Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, and others). America would “clean up” the Middle East through violent regime change. In truth, it was the old playbook, yet in an especially treacherous part of the world. And the consequences have demonstrated the sheer hubris and incompetence of the effort.
The Middle East wars not only failed politically but they also cost trillions of dollars, financed largely by deficit spending and rising public debt. The ratio of U.S. public debt to GDP soared from 34 percent in 2000 to around 76 percent in 2016. In the meantime, America’s reputation in the world plummeted, and the United States ceased to be viewed as a constructive partner for global problem solving. And in the midst of the Middle East wars, Wall Street visited a virulent financial crisis on the world, itself produced in no small part through hubris and financial criminality, again with almost no accountability for the miscreants.
For a country steeped in the mythos of global salvation, we have run dangerously off course. American exceptionalism has guided us into endless war and driven us deeply into debt. Yet just when it’s most crucial that we step back to the internationalist position championed by Roosevelt with the creation of the United Nations, we are moving in exactly the opposite direction.
EXCEPTIONALISM IN THE ERA OF TRUMP
Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy represents a new and vulgar strain of American exceptionalism. It proudly proclaims its intention to maintain U.S. military dominance as the core pillar of U.S. foreign policy. Trump’s National Security Strategy (NSS) uses the term “overmatch” to signify this military dominance:
The United States must retain overmatch—the combination of capabilities in sufficient scale to prevent enemy success and to ensure that America’s sons and daughters will never be in a fair fight. Overmatch strengthens our diplomacy and permits us to shape the international environment to protect our interests. To retain military overmatch the United States must restore our ability to produce innovative capabilities, restore the readiness of our forces for major war, and grow the size of the force so that it is capable of operating at sufficient scale and for ample duration to win across a range of scenarios.10
A fundamental pillar of Trump’s America First exceptionalism is therefore the intention to invest massively in a new arms race with China, Russia, and other adversaries.
America First introduces several distinctive strains, however. The first is a naked nationalism in a world of clashing interests. “We are prioritizing the interests of our citizens and protecting our sovereign rights as a nation,” writes Trump in his cover letter to the new strategy. “A central continuity in history is the contest for power. The present time is no different,” states the NSS. “China and Russia want to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests”—antithetical to, not merely competitive with.
The second is racism. America First is really White America First. Trump’s electoral campaign against “Mexican rapists” and “Muslim terrorists,” his failures to denounce American white supremacists, his attack on immigration to the United States from “shithole” countries including Haiti and African nations, his call for more immigration from countries like Norway, all play directly to his electoral base: older, less-educated, white Americans.
In this regard, Trump is part of a worldwide wave of anti-immigrant and racist politics stoked by the large-scale migration and refugee movements of the past quarter century. Trump also represents the latest virulent outbreak of America’s long history of racism. As I recount in chapter 17, America’s 1924 Immigration Act was indeed designed to spur immigration from the Nordic countries. Not surprisingly, it was much appreciated by Hitler and the Nazi immigration lawyers.
The third distinctive strain of America First exceptionalism is economic populism, albeit of a Trumpian variety. Populism, in name, means an appeal to the average person, the “common man and woman,” against special interests. I have no problem, and indeed I have much sympathy, with this sentiment. Where populists like Trump go wrong is that they stir their followers with simplistic diagnoses and promises that they cannot fulfill. Then, to try to rescue themselves, they usually raid the treasury, with deficit spending to eke out more time in power. They typically fall from power when their promises of higher living standards fail to materialize, and the budget deficits produce high inflation or a solvency crisis.
Trump’s economic populism has some important distinctive elements. First, unlike typical populism, Trump’s policies are benefiting mainly the rich rather than his working-class base of voters. A truly populist tax cut would have given most of the benefits to workers and their families, not to wealthy and powerful corporations, as is in fact the case. As is often the case with economic populists, Trump’s tax cut will increase the budget deficit, putting added strains on future budgetary policies and inflation.
Second, Trump’s economic populism takes aim at foreigners, further shielding America’s own rich from scrutiny and fiscal accountability. Trump has told his working-class followers that their travails are due mainly to illegal migrants and overseas Mexican and Chinese workers, all of whom, Trump claims, have taken the jobs of hardworking (mainly white) Americans. They’ve gotten away with it, according to Trump, because American trade negotiators have given away the store to Mexico, China, and other foreign countries.
As I explained in Building the New American Economy, Trump’s view is nonsense.11 Yes, trade has opened the gap between rich and poor in the U.S. economy, not because of unfair trade practices abroad or bad trade negotiations but because the United States exports capital-intensive goods in return for labor-intensive imports from abroad. The expansion of this kind of trade indeed widens inequality in the United States, but the correct response is to keep trade open (which enlarges the overall U.S. and world economy) while redistributing income from America’s rich to the poor, a solution that runs diametrically opposite to Trump’s policies of aiding the rich at the expense of the poor.
All of this raises an ultimate question. For whose benefit is America First? Is the arms buildup really designed to promote U.S. national security? Is the sale of hundreds of billions of dollars of armaments to Middle Eastern nations really designed to promote peace? Was the 2017 tax cutting really designed to boost living standards of average households? Is the emerging economic war with China really to raise the well-being of typical Americans?
Perhaps the one overriding truth of America politics in recent decades is the overarching political power of the main corporate lobbies: the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, Big Oil, and Big Health Care.12 Perhaps the best way to understand Trump’s economic policies is to focus not on his populist rhetoric but on the interests of the powerful corporate lobbies. The tax cuts and anti-environmental actions of the Trump administration certainly favor Big Oil, Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, and Big Health Care. In the name of populism, we see a policy of corporatism—putting the companies, not America, first. As with most populisms, Trump’s variety is almost sure to breed significant disappointment among Americans, including Trump’s own political base.
American exceptionalism today is more than ever divorced from reality. This is a hard truth, and one that many Americans are not yet willing to accept—as evidenced by the unexpected electoral success of Trump’s rallying cry to “make America great again.” For Trump and the exceptionalists like him, the United States is still the unrivaled and unmatched global superpower. America’s economy is still number 1, as long as the unfairness of foreigners is checked and brought under control. In truth, the remedies for America’s security and economic needs lie not in bashing foreigners, expanding the arms race, cutting corporate taxes, or increasing the budget deficit. The real answers lie in global cooperation; a boost of critical investments at home in education, skills, technology, and environmental protection; and more help for the poor, paid for by more tax collections, rather than yet another round of tax cuts, and by savings from a bloated military budget.