The Decline of American Exceptionalism

During his first term in office, President Bill Clinton echoed Lincoln, saying, “My policy is to have no policy.”

To have no policy is to have no firm political principles, no moral convictions, hence, no sense of honor. This obviously does not represent Lincoln who, as one scholar has written, meant that he, Lincoln, “would take matters one step at a time, make each decision as it came up, and base the new decision on the effect of the last one.” This pragmatism is quite consistent with the president who, on grounds of moral principle, refused to compromise on the slavery issue even if the consequence meant civil war. This was not the pragmatism of Bill Clinton.

Morally neutral or unprincipled pragmatism—the coin of hack politicians—cannot but undermine American Exceptionalism in a world steeped in moral relativism and tyranny. In this forbidding world, America has been the guardian of Judeo-Christian civilization. We saw this in the Second World War and in the Cold War, when the United States saved mankind from the totalitarian imperialism of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Today we face the threat of Islamic totalitarianism. This threat has been trivialized by Barack Obama, Bill Clinton’s political descendant, a cultural relativist who disparages the American Declaration of Independence, the basis of American Exceptionalism.

The ups and downs of America Exceptionalism are most significant in American foreign policy. Mr. Clinton’s abandonment of American Exceptionalism was most evident in his dignifying PLO terrorist chief Yasser Arafat at the White House, and allowing him to open the equivalent of an embassy in Washington, D.C. Is it any wonder that there is hardly a single state in the democratic world that did not dignify the godfather of international terrorism? The first casualty of democracy is honor.

Is it not appalling that a superpower like the United States should recognize the PLO, a gang of thugs? This ignominious deed of the Carter Administration facilitated the groveling behavior of President Barack Obama who bowed to Saudi King Abdullah, a despot whose regime has financed hundreds of mosques in America that preach hatred of the United States, of Israel, indeed, of Judea-Christian civilization. And if this were not enough to illustrate the decline of America Exceptionalism, the same post-America president extended his hand to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who baldly screams “death to America”!

When all is said and done, however, the decline of American honor did not begin with Mr. Clinton. He inherited a State Department tainted by cultural relativism or moral equivalence, a doctrine that makes no distinction between good and evil regimes and thus denies—as Barack Obama explicitly denies—American Exceptionalism, a civilization based on the Natural Rights or “Higher Law” doctrine of the Declaration of Independence.

There was a time that when the State Department was animated by the ethics of American Exceptionalism. For example, the United States refused to recognize the Soviet Union in 1917 and did not do so until 1933, with the advent of the Roosevelt administration. Here is how Robert Lansing, Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, justified non-recognition of the Bolshevik regime: “To recognize the Bolsheviks would give them an exalted idea of their own power, make them more insolent and impossible, and win their contempt, not their friendship…. As to Lenin and Trotsky I am in doubt … For national and personal honor, for truth and for the individual rights to life, liberty and property they seem to have no regard.”

Mr. Lansing was succeeded by Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby who in 1920 declared: “The existing regime in Russia is based upon the negation of every principle of honor and good faith, and every usage and convention, underlying the whole structure of international law; the negation, in short, of every principle upon which it is possible to base harmonious and trustful relations, whether of nations or of individuals.”

Mr. Colby was succeeded by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes (who later became Chief Justice of the American Supreme Court). Mr. Hughes said in 1923: “The American government is not prepared to barter away its principles [by recognizing the Soviet Union].”

Five years later Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg avowed: “The experience of various European Governments which have recognized and entered into relations with the Soviet regime have demonstrated conclusively the wisdom of the [non-recognition] policy to which the Government of the United States has consistently adhered. Recognition of the Soviet regime has not … led [its leaders] to the acceptance by them of other fundamental obligations of international intercourse.”

Finally, and to appreciate how far the American Left has drifted from American Exceptionalism, consider the words of John Spargo, a leading figure of the American Socialist Party, who in 1930 declared: “It is futile to argue the matter; recognition of Soviet Russia [which seeks our own subversion] would be shameful self-abasement.”

What would John Spargo say of a superpower like the U.S. recognizing the PLO? And what would any man of honor say of Barack Obama extending his hand to Iranian despot Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

We are witnessing the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of democracy, more precisely, of the secular democratic state. This is obvious in post-Christian Europe. But the signs of this decay are also evident in post-Zionist Israel. Israeli prime ministers have shaken the bloodstained hands of Arab terrorists and have even yielded sacred land to these murderers. This decline of Western Civilization cannot but encourage Islamic despots to devise the means of crippling the West by crippling America.

It will require heroic and sustained efforts to restore American Exceptionalism.