We are all Americans now, announced that now famous Le Monde headline after Sept. 11 2001. Back then, more than three years ago, it felt true. But we all know the feeling is not as strong now; and we also sense that it is not George Bush alone who has made it so. Maybe, now is the time when the rest of us should begin to stop being Americans at all.
The Bush administration’s policy of “America first” is neither some personal obsession on Bush’s part nor a spasm in response to the shock of Sept. 11. It is part of a much older, wider and very specifically American conservative sense of exceptionalism whose militancy and energy are still greatly underestimated outside America. The rejection of international institutions and stable alliances is a signature aspect of this militant new exceptionalism. From the point of view of the administration and the bulk of its Republican supporters, however, this unilateralism is merely one aspect of a distinctive worldview which has little parallel in any other liberal democracy, and which might best be seen as a modern reincarnation of the old American preoccupation with “manifest destiny”.
The concept of manifest destiny first entered American political parlance in the 1840s, when continental expansionism first became physically sustainable. The phrase comes from a journalist, John L O’Sullivan, who proclaimed that it was America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions”. It became the ideological justification for the annexation of Texas, followed by California and Oregon, was part of the thinking involved in the purchase of Alaska from Russia, provoked occasional 19th-century dreams about the subjugation of Canada, and resurfaced once more in the seizure of Cuba in 1898.
The Lebensraum aspect of manifest destiny is less significant now. But the military power that always went with it is not. Yet the part of O’Sullivan’s phrase that resonates most for many core Republicans today is the part that concerns Providence’s wishes for America. There has been this strand to American ideology ever since the Puritans first described their settlement in the New World as the creation of a city upon a hill, on which the eyes of the world were trained. It has always been part of many American religious cultures, most notably Scots-Irish Protestantism and the too often neglected phenomenon of Mormonism. But it has resurfaced in the past decade at the very heart of American politics. Bush’s apparent acceptance of the view that he may be doing God’s work in the White House has been much noted in this country as the campaign has wound through the autumn. But this is not some idiosyncratic hubris on the president’s part. It is shared by millions of American conservative evangelical Protestants, many of whom believe, along with Attorney-General John Ashcroft, that the very existence of the United States is proof of a divine purpose. In that context, the idea that America should reject ties with necessarily less blessed nations becomes existential, an exceptionalism of another order altogether.
Most Americans don’t think in these terms, of course. Yet sufficiently large numbers of them do for their conviction to be massively important, especially when they are so determined and have such powerful armed forces. If you believe that God has a higher purpose for your work, then you bring a special fervor to everything that you do, whether it is re-electing the president, challenging his opponent’s credentials, stopping his voters from voting, challenging their votes or — if by some cruel fate the opponent wins the election — preventing him from governing. Just what they did with Clinton, in fact.
It is the centrality to American public life of this militant conservatism, more than any other single factor, which makes current British policy toward the United States so difficult to pursue productively or honorably and which has brought this country’s relationship with the US to its present ebb. Tony Blair’s policy has been entirely consistent — to stick fast to America under all circumstances. It will clearly remain his policy whether Bush wins or Kerry.
But it shouldn’t. It would be a more defensible policy if American parties were like European parties — but they are not, with the consequence that the policy becomes a hostage to the Republican right when the Republicans are in power and is constrained by them when the Democrats are in the White House. The invasion of Iraq, in this context, is more an example of British marginality than a good or a bad policy in itself. Unless British policy adapts and changes to these realities, it is doomed to be replayed over Iran or Cuba or whatever other adventure becomes the conservative right’s next test of God’s higher purpose.
Breaking out of this vice is therefore the most pressing and serious task facing this country’s foreign policy.
