“Governments and societies of exceptionalist states develop a need to have external enemies; for this reason, threats are often concocted or, where minor, are inflated to extreme proportions.”
—K. J. Holsti1
“We will never escape the material underpinnings of historical knowledge production. But by investigating the marketplaces of remembering that give shape and meaning to American cultural memory of the past, we can deconstruct the narratives with which Americans have made and remade identity as fundamentally innocent.”
—Boyd Cothran2
“Brutality, torture, and excess should be understood as an essential element of American statecraft, not its corruption or deviation.”
—Dylan Rodriguez3
Our chapters up until this point have analyzed the ways in which American exceptionalism and innocence have legitimated the American capitalist empire at every stage of its development. American exceptionalism has formed the backbone of the white supremacist and capitalist ideology of the U.S. imperial project. American innocence is a trusted ideological partner to exceptionalist ethos that washes away all guilt and accountability for the project’s massive crimes. Ideologies of exceptionalism and innocence bestow upon the U.S. imperial project a sense of “goodness” that Americans, especially white Americans, can be proud of. Because of the American way of life’s essential “goodness,” many Americans feel they do not have to concern themselves with the terror and havoc that their government has spread all around the globe. More than a few Americans even claim ignorance to the endless wars the U.S. wages worldwide or the ubiquity of racism within American borders. After all, it is difficult to name such evils when these wars are popularly framed as “humanitarian” interventions, “revolutions,” or just plain “forgotten.” You cannot fight what you cannot name.
However, the American imperial project is not an invincible force. Prior systems of societal organization have collapsed and been replaced. American exceptionalism and innocence have sought to render this reality invisible. While these ideologies reify the imperial project, they cannot resolve the inherent contradictions of the system and the crises these contradictions produce. Maybe no other development exemplifies this more than the ongoing hysteria about Russia that has captured the full attention of the American imperial project.
Since the inauguration of Donald Trump, one of the most talked about stories in the American corporate media and the Washington political establishment has been Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 elections. The allegations came at a tumultuous period for the American imperial project. On the international front, American imperial power has been most starkly challenged by Russia and China. Chinese economic activity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America has threatened U.S. economic dominance and prompted a massive buildup of American military power in Africa and the Asia Pacific through the “pivot to Asia” and AFRICOM. Russia has also experienced a political and economic revival of late. Its intervention to protect the integrity of the Syrian government from the machinations of U.S. warfare in 2015 sent a strong message to the U.S. that Russia will no longer tolerate the instability and subservience imposed on the country after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Putin’s tenure as Russian head of state has also led to a more independent Russian economy. Russia has grown closer to China and further away from the American and European orders that celebrated the fall of the Soviet Union, an event that Putin has called the “greatest political catastrophe” of the 20th century.
Concern about the newfound political and economic independence of the Russian Federation has been discussed openly by the American ruling class. An array of studies from the RAND corporation and the Pentagon have warned of the dangers presented by the rise of Russia and China to American hegemony. Former Secretary of Defense for the Trump Administration James Mattis cited “great power confrontation” with Russia and China as the primary challenge to American interests in the United States’ latest National Security Strategy.4 However, it was Obama’s Administration that dramatically escalated tensions with Russia. His two terms saw the immense expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) along Russia’s borders despite the United States’ promise not to expand NATO’s presence in Eastern Europe during negotiations with Russia in 1990. These imperial maneuvers on the part of Obama culminated in the 2014 coup in Ukraine that brought a Nazi-aligned government to the Russian border and the world to the brink of war.
On the domestic front, the American imperial project faced a similar level of turmoil. This turmoil rose to the surface all at once during the 2016 presidential race. Billionaire arch-racist Donald Trump defeated each and every establishment Republican candidate by a wide margin by ramping up right-wing, racist American orthodoxy combined with hardline positions against corporate free-trade agreements and “regime-change” wars. Hillary Clinton, the presumed favorite to become the first woman president of the U.S., struggled to defeat the wildly popular Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary while exercising her connections in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to ensure that the Vermont Senator’s popular policy positions of single-payer health care, student loan forgiveness, and living wage employment would not have a chance to face up against the politics of Donald Trump in the general election.
Many Democrats and Republicans believed that Hillary Clinton was the most likely candidate to defeat Donald Trump despite polls that showed Sanders winning a general election by a wider margin than Clinton. Analysts of the ruling class instead depended on polls that suggested Clinton was a shoo-in for president. These polls ignored several inconvenient truths about the 2016 election, such as the fact that WikiLeaks had done irreparable damage to Clinton’s reputation by releasing information from her email server that revealed her role in the DNC conspiracy against Bernie Sanders and her long list of high-paid speeches for Wall Street. Clinton increasingly looked like a candidate for war and Wall Street while the American corporate media gave her opponent Donald Trump billions of dollars worth of coverage in an attempt to paint the billionaire as an outsider with little credentials to hold presidential office.
Little could the American imperial project predict that these conditions would push voters to view the Clinton versus Trump option as no option at all.5 Non-voters in the 2016 general election represented the largest voting bloc.6 This gave the Republican Party and Donald Trump the edge necessary to win the electoral college and, as a result, the presidency. The loss sent shockwaves through the entire U.S. imperial apparatus, not just the Democratic Party. Trump embarrassed a large portion of the ruling class, with many corporate media outlets comparing him to Hitler or calling him America’s own Hugo Chavez. A calculated decision was made to rid of the embarrassment by portraying Trump as a dupe of Russia, first to exonerate Clinton of accountability in her electoral loss and then to achieve broader bipartisan objectives with Trump in office.
The Trump-Russia connection story began with Trump’s campaign promise to ease relations with Russia. When WikiLeaks dumped private emails written by Clinton on an unsecure server in July of 2016, Trump applauded the whistleblower organization. A plethora of Clinton supporters in the U.S. intelligence departments began to question whether Trump, WikiLeaks, and Russia were working together to undermine American “democracy,” defined here as Clinton’s surefire victory. This alone should have caused outrage among Americans struggling to survive under a political system that even former President Jimmy Carter has called an oligarchy.7 That such outrage never occurred demonstrates how deeply the ideology of American innocence has penetrated the American psyche. Sure, a good number of Americans were disillusioned by the trajectory of the 2016 elections up until this point. Severe damage had been done to the Clinton campaign for stealing the Democratic primary from Bernie Sanders. And Sanders gained popularity in large part because the “billionaire class” (as Sanders puts it) had been exposed for using its fortunes to buy politicians and control the policies of all three branches of government. Still, few if any Americans mustered open condemnation of the emerging narrative that placed Russia at the forefront of a conspiracy to undermine an American “democracy” that worked only for the rich.
Clinton’s campaign was thus afforded the political space to masquerade as the embodiment of democracy. It followed up on the simmering suspicions of Russian subversion by incorporating the allegations into her campaign talking points. Clinton posted questions on her website such as “Why is Trump encouraging Russia to interfere in our election?”8 The FBI, CIA, and the NSA responded to Clinton’s questions of Russian interference with the launch of an investigation into whether Russia interfered in the election to Trump’s benefit. The investigation remains ongoing.
So much has happened since the investigation was set into motion that negates the claim of Russia’s responsibility for Trump’s victory. What we know is that as early as April 2016, the Clinton campaign had paid Fusion GPS, the corporation responsible for the “Steele Dossier,” to find links between Russia and Trump.9 Former intelligence agent Christopher Steele was a paid Clinton informant. Using his connections to American intelligence agencies, Steele paid sources to concoct the unverified narrative that Putin had “blackmailed” Trump by videotaping his salacious activities in Russia. Trump’s foreign policy advisor Carter Page was then accused of collaborating with Russian diplomats by promising to ease sanctions in exchange for the “Russian hack” of the DNC. These allegations have been promoted as fact by American intelligence and corporate media channels despite the complete absence of evidence.
Allegations of Russia “hacking” or “interfering” in the 2016 elections have become a criminal indictment in and of themselves. The CIA and its allies claim Trump was blackmailed by Russia, but evidence seems to suggest the opposite. As Dan Kovalik explains,
. . . it was not the Russians who came to Trump to tell him that they had incriminating evidence on him, as any blackmailer would do. No, it was the CIA—who we know wants to pressure Trump into staying on the path toward confrontation with Russia—that not only went to Trump about the allegedly incriminating evidence on him, but also went to a number of other government officials and the public to let them know about this “evidence.”10
Obama’s CIA director John Brennan led the charge in “warning” Trump to withdraw his campaign promise to ease relations with Russia. Brennan’s CIA then became the chief distributor of the “Russia interference” story to the the media, Trump, and the general public. Heads of the other sixteen American intelligence agencies joined the chorus, including Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. That Clapper, Brennan, or the CIA could be considered trustworthy sources of information speaks to the level of credibility of the Russia investigation. Clapper has consistently lied under oath about the illegal spying conducted by the NSA on American citizens.11 Brennan has defended torture as useful “harsh interrogation techniques.”12 And the CIA’s long record of lying to the American public about the dangers of “communism” helped the agency facilitate deadly wars and coups in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, including the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. This coup alone led to the death and disappearance of tens of thousands of Chileans and the full privatization of the economy.
Chile is not the only victim of U.S. foreign meddling, particularly in Latin America. Billions of American tax dollars have been poured into “soft power” NGOs such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). NED has a long history of using its influence to stop democracy in its tracks. It helped undermine the democratic Sandinista movement in Nicaragua in 1990 after the CIA had for years sponsored “contra” mercenaries to sow violent discord throughout the country.13 NED also provided millions of dollars to the right-wing opposition in Venezuela responsible for the short-lived 2002 coup of democratically elected Hugo Chavez.14 Indeed, as Stephen Kinzer notes, NED labeled Russia a “priority country” in 2013, meaning that it topped the list of nations that the U.S. wants to overthrow by way of its electoral process. Despite no shortage of evidence, American liberals and Democratic Party faithfuls are often ignorant of the United States’ long history of subverting democracy around the world. And when they are aware, their conclusions are steeped in the ideology of American innocence that presumes their government’s destruction of democratic movements and elections abroad is paved with “good intentions.”
“Good intentions” are almost never coupled with the evidence necessary to justify the disastrous conditions produced by American meddling. In the case of Russia, the U.S. is supposedly defending democracy through its investigation of Putin’s alleged role in Trump’s victory. However, the hardly reliable intelligence sources leading the Russia investigation have admitted that little evidence exists to prove their claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election. A “National Intelligence Estimate” report devised mainly by the CIA, FBI, and NSA directly after Trump’s inauguration in January of 2017 began to backtrack from the story that Russia “hacked” the DNC and pivoted to a narrative that blamed Russian media such as Russia Today (RT) for contributing to “the [2016 election] campaign by serving as a platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences.”15 This report, widely claimed as the most irrefutable evidence of Russian interference, states that “the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.”16 Even when U.S. security officials testified in June of 2017 that unverified “Russians” backed by the Russian government hacked election systems in 21 states, no evidence was found to suggest that their actions affected the final results.17
So if Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia is based on unproven allegations that ultimately had no effect on the outcome of the 2016 elections, then why has such a large section of the American ruling class continued its nonstop investigation of the matter? Between February 20th and March 31st, 2017, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow spoke of Russian “collusion” with Trump for 53 percent of her broadcasts.18 It could be argued that even a cursory study of the American corporate news media generally may yield an even larger percentage focused on the Russia election story. The cacophonous obsession with Russia on the part of the American ruling class has continued ultimately because of its contemporary usefulness. In the absence of its preferred presidential candidate, the U.S. imperial project has successfully carried out its domestic and foreign policy objectives while Americans set their gaze on an unverified Russian “threat” to American “democracy.”
Blaming Russia for undermining so-called American democracy has given the U.S. a convenient foe to justify its military expansion worldwide. If everything “bad” is Russia’s fault, then the U.S. is the only force of “good” available in the world. Russia has been labeled a “bad country” not only for its alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Americans are also repeatedly told that Russia is “bad” because it imprisons journalists, oppresses the LGBTQ community, and poisons former intelligence operatives in other countries (see the Skripal case). These accusations have either gone unverified or exaggerated for political aims; and even if they were true, their impact would pale in comparison to the war crimes that the U.S. has committed in Iraq alone. Since 2004, it is estimated that 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Yet we are told that “bad” Russian meddling is the reason why Trump was forced by Congress in 2017 to sign a “good” military budget larger than the one even he proposed, with billions added in military operations along the Russian border to “deter Russian aggression.” “Bad” Russian meddling also led to a unanimous Congressional vote to renew “good” sanctions, forcing Trump to renew sanctions against Russia and North Korea and impose new ones on Iran. American military encroachments, whether in the form of murdering Russian pilots in Syria or moving American military installations closer and closer to the Russian border, are thus “good policies” seeking to punish a “bad” Russia regardless of the fact that such an orientation threatens human existence with a new world war of nuclear proportions.
What is important to realize, however, is that when it comes to war, there really is no contest between the U.S. and Russia (or China). The U.S. is hands down the most violent war-maker in human history. This means that punishing Russia is not the only consequence of the Russia blame game. Some authors and activists such as the late William Blum have characterized the United States’ obsession with Russia as a new Cold War. The war has two fronts. The first is international in scope. Demonizing Russia prepares the American public for another war abroad, this time with a foe in possession of an equal if not greater nuclear capacity than the American military. The second front of the new Cold War is domestic. Casting blame on Russia for what transpired during the 2016 presidential election has also led to a counterinsurgency war against dissent similar to the first Cold War.
Unlike the first Cold War, which targeted the very real threat of communist movements replacing the capitalist order worldwide, the new Cold War has been brought about by a crisis in American exceptionalism. The Democratic Party has led the charge against Russia and used the Putin-led menace to blame everyone but itself for Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing loss to Trump. Russians have been accused of buying $50,000 in social media ads to spur the Black Lives Matter and environmental movements. Sputnik News and Russia Today (RT) have been forced to register as “foreign agents.” Thirteen anonymous Russians have been blamed for “sowing discord” in the U.S. political system, mainly through social media. Radical voices and formations such as the Green Party have been censored and silenced as a result, with Google and Facebook promptly changing their algorithms to make left-wing media increasingly difficult for internet users to find. All of this has been done in the name of countering Russian-backed “fake news.” As Matt Taibbi writes of the January 2017 National Intelligence Estimate report on Russian interference, the report
“assessed” that Russians were behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee. The conclusion among other things was based upon the security agencies’ interpretation of programming on the Russian-backed channel RT. RT stories about 100% American protests against fracking, surveillance abuses, and “alleged Wall Street greed,” were part of “Russian strategic messaging” campaigns, the intelligence analysts insisted.19
These claims successfully demonized WikiLeaks as an agent of Russia and blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss on progressive and radical voices, including Bernie Sanders. Forget that WikiLeaks uncovered the Clinton campaign’s attacks on Sanders through its connections with the DNC, or that WikiLeaks revealed that the CIA has copied the cyber techniques of hackers all over the world and has the capabilities of using these techniques against targeted individual or state entities.20 We should also forget that Clinton has a long history of supporting racism and austerity, calling Black American males “super predators” in her defense of Bill Clinton’s massive escalation of mass Black imprisonment and playing an instrumental role in gutting welfare in the mid-1990s. Finally, forget that Clinton received millions of dollars from despotic dictators in Saudi Arabia and financiers on Wall Street in exchange for peddling wars abroad and supporting Wall Street–friendly policies. Accusations of a Putin plot successfully influencing the 2016 elections in Trump’s favor to “embarrass” the American political system on the world stage have effectively shifted blame for Clinton’s loss and the crisis of the American political system onto a foreign actor. The truth is that our nation’s “democracy” has always been a cleverly hidden embarrassment as far as humanity is concerned.
The crisis of the American political system is really a crisis of American exceptionalism. Trump did not win the popular vote, yet the Clinton campaign refused to criticize the undemocratic electoral college system and Republican Party-led voter fraud for its loss. Nor did it reflect on the reasons for low voter turnout. Trump’s occupation of the oval office signaled a deep loss of popular faith in the American political system that the American ruling class could not afford to question. The American imperial project relies on projections of exceptionalism to justify its rule but has nothing to offer the great majority of people around the world. Trump’s opponents in Washington have scantily criticized the billionaire for his overt racism and xenophobia that has understandably sparked outrage among millions of Americans. These attributes are less worthy of condemnation and impeachment than Trump’s expressed closeness to Russia. Administrative appointments such as Michael Flynn have found themselves quickly ousted due to alleged conversations with Russian diplomats yet Trump’s opposition in Washington have failed to muster the same excitement when it comes to the president’s assault on people of color.
It isn’t as if there aren’t innumerable qualities about Trump that understandably prompt mass outrage. His racist demagoguery toward immigrants, his dangerous provocations toward the DPRK, and his heinous comments about women are all reasons to condemn the rule of the billionaire real estate magnate who has made his fortune exploiting workers. While superficial commentary has been made by the American ruling class on these issues, Trump has received the embrace of his elite opponents when he has fallen in line with the American establishment. For example, following one of his first speeches to Congress that saw Trump pay tribute to the family of a Navy SEAL who died in a raid in Yemen, CNN’s liberal darling Van Jones commented that Trump “became President of the United States in that moment, period.” When Trump ordered missile strikes on a Syrian airbase in April of 2017, MSNBC’s Brian Williams praised Trump for using his “beautiful weapons” while others called the act of war his most “presidential” moment since winning the election. The American ruling class has thus created a path for Trump to escape the torrent of criticism he has received since taking office. As long as Trump keeps fueling the U.S. war machine, everyone in the establishment is happy. Even still, the American ruling class refuses to drop the Russia story lest it be forced to confront the dwindling faith in the American political system among the masses. Avoiding such a confrontation is something every millionaire politician in Washington can agree on.
The more the so-called Russia scandal distracts from the real issues affecting Americans, the less Americans trust the U.S. political system. Russia has become the object of elite opposition to Trump as a last ditch effort to reinforce the worldview that America’s inherent exceptionalism is in fact under attack from an external foe that has placed a “Manchurian candidate” in the White House. For example, scapegoating Russia helps justify the consolidation of the American imperial project under the leadership of its military and intelligence apparatuses. The World Socialist Website recently conducted a study of Democratic Party candidates in the 2018 midterm elections and found that former State Department, military, and national security intelligence operatives made up one quarter of all Democratic Party challengers for Congress.21 The gradual takeover of the U.S. apparatus by military and intelligence elites ostensibly points to the continuation of American hysteria over Russia for years to come. This has become all the more necessary in a political context where the Democratic Party is unable to offer poor and oppressed people any alternatives to corporate and imperial rule. Ruthless austerity, endless war, and draconian state repression have become staples of Democratic Party policy, leaving it with nothing but the tools of the old Cold War to maintain legitimacy with American voters.
Democratic Party-led attempts to revive American exceptionalism at the expense of Russia have relied on the ideology of American innocence as an escape route from accountability. “Evil” Russians lurk in every corner of American life in the new Cold War, similar to the “evil” communists of the old Cold War. Russians undermine American elections, spark social unrest and instability, and aggressively wage war on American institutions. They are to blame for the decline of American exceptionalism, even if the specific “evils” Russia is accused of perpetrating are staples of American domestic and foreign policy. The U.S. has undermined countless elections around the world, including the 1996 presidential election in Russia. It has caused instability both domestically and around the world through the levers of free market capitalist economics and military invasion. U.S. liberals tend to be the most offended by this claim, accusing such “defenders of the Kremlin” of engaging in a distracting game of “what-about-ism.” When media pundits are forced to entertain this objection, the nation’s long history of meddling in other countries’ elections is justified in a number of ways. The U.S. meddled for that country’s own good, they say. Or, if the devastating conditions produced by U.S. meddling become public, then the operation was nothing but a mistake made with the best of intentions. It is impossible, though, for Russia to have good intentions. If they meddle, it’s to execute some sinister plan. Yet the U.S. has aggressively waged war, whether on undocumented immigrants, Black Americans, its own Indigenous populations, or nations around the world (like Russia) to secure economic and political dominance worldwide for centuries. When it comes to the “evil” Russia narrative, the ideology of American innocence functions to reinforce the sanctity of American citizenship whereby identifying as “American” means that the U.S. could never be blamed for the embarassing results of the 2016 elections or the historical conditions that precipitated them.
The new and old Cold wars have promoted American citizenship as the leading force for “good” on the political stage. “Evil” is defined by imperial script writers. Russians play the “evil” role in the new Cold War, replacing the communists of the old Cold War. According to Tony Perruci, “The Communist was always seen to be acting, while the anti-Communist American was transparently truthful. The American citizen, constituted in noble sincerity, refused mimesis and instead inhabited an authentic citizenship. So strong was the belief in the anti-Communist honesty, that the fictionalized film adaptation of professional informer Matt Cvetic’s memoir, I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), was nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar in 1951.”22 The equation of anti-communism with “authentic” American citizenship allowed the U.S. to villainize Black freedom fighters, Communist Party leaders, and just about anyone who challenged American imperial domestic and foreign policy in the mid-20th century. Deportations, arrests, and executions for alleged communist sympathies were commonplace. In the mid-20th century, U.S. imperialism was on a rampage of expansion around the world. Communism was depicted as an even greater evil than imperialism, thus rendering the criminally racist structures of Jim Crow and imperial warfare invisible at best or critically important anti-communist crusades at worst. The replacement of communists with Russians beginning in 2016 comes at a time when the American ruling class needs an “inauthentic” non-citizen to blame for the misery it has imposed on the planet. And like the first Cold War, this has led to the suppression of radical political alternatives and the expansion of dangerous wars that masquerade as crusades against the great Russian “threat” to American civilization.
The new Cold War has indeed captured the consciousness of many progressives and even those who consider themselves radicals. Corporate media headlines regularly include terms like “Putin’s Russia” and “authoritarian Russia.” Social movements such as Black Lives Matter have been portrayed as dupes of Russia just as the Black Freedom and Labor movements were seen as dupes of the Soviet Union in the 20th century. Thus, the development of a radical imagination that can chart a course out of the desperate attempts to revive American exceptionalism is of critical importance. We need look no further than Paul Robeson for guidance as to how to begin the process.
Paul Robeson was a member of the Communist Party USA. A widely popular Black actor and singer, Robeson came under severe attack from the anti-communist House Committee of Un-American Activities (HUAC). What FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described as Robeson’s “extreme advocacy of the independence movements of the colonial peoples of Africa” led to the State Department revocation of his passport and his exclusion from the music/film industry. However, such repression only reaffirmed Robeson’s internationalist and anti-racist principles rather than alter them. Gerald Horne recounts Robeson’s testimony in a 1948 hearing accusing the Black radical of “communist subversion” of the United States:
Robeson admitted what could not be denied. He had travelled to Moscow: “I was there for over a period say between ’34 and ’37, two weeks, three weeks, three months . . .” And he refused to back down from his bedrock opinion: “I found in Russia,” he maintained, “complete absence of racial prejudice.” This was “the first time in my life, Senator,” he argued, “that I was able to walk the earth with complete dignity as a human being.”23
Indeed, Robeson had not only traveled to the Soviet Union, but he had also enrolled his children to attend school in the “evil” communist country.24 His principled stance in defense of the Soviet Union and against the American racist and imperial state was not received well. Robeson was called the “Black Stalin” by the Truman Administration. While the Russia of today is not the Soviet Union, Robeson’s example remains relevant. Robeson asked the American working class and poor, especially Black Americans, why the Soviet Union should be their enemy when America’s own version of apartheid and war was creating desperate conditions all around the world. He also refused to answer questions regarding his affiliations with communists or the Communist Party, seeing them as illegitimate attempts to criminalize the righteous resistance of the people. The context of U.S. imperialism in 2016 may differ in form from the period of 1948, but the underlying structure is the same. Both Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda’s courage and commitment to transnational solidarity provide important lessons for those wanting to resist the new Cold War of the present.25
Like the Robesons, we should challenge the American imperial project’s obsession with labeling Russia as “evil” when it is the “evils” of the U.S. system that created the need to blame Russia in the first place. And like Robeson, we should defend Russia from American imperial provocations, the scope of which threaten all of humanity. To embrace the Russia hysteria plaguing Washington means to defend American exceptionalism and innocence in a moment of crisis unseen in American history. It is to embrace the same class of Americans that accused Saddam Hussein of having “weapons of mass destruction” in order to justify the invasion of Iraq and the massive reduction of civil liberties within our borders. U.S. imperialism requires the creation of new enemies when old ones are no longer able to help it maintain legitimacy in the eyes of many Americans and people around the world. The dwindling legitimacy of the American political and economic system, not Russia, is to blame for the ascendancy of Trump. The scapegoating of Russia is an act of desperation that seeks to preserve America’s exceptional and innocent identity. Those who truly want to see progressive and radical changes in this country must understand that America’s exceptional and innocent identity is one of the most troublesome obstacles standing in the way.