All countries, like all people, think of themselves as unique, but the American case is stronger than many others. Few states match its size, none equal it in wealth or power, and only a handful like India and Brazil approach the astonishing geographic and cultural diversity of the United States. This country is one of a kind, but the rest of the world fixates on American politics and follows American culture less because of its curiosities than because of its consequence. Since the United States emerged as the world’s leading power about a century ago, its attempts to shape the globe to suit its preferences have had an immense impact on international affairs.
Many outside observers have described America as an exceptional nation. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French nobleman who traveled to the United States to study its prisons and practically invented the field of sociology to describe this exhilarating and maddening country, was one of the first. He believed, “the position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.” He meant specifically that Americans could borrow European intellectual advances “without relapsing into barbarism.”1
Later generations thought that America was exceptional in other ways. As waves of fanaticism roiled Europe in the twentieth century, mid-century American liberals comforted themselves that, as Daniel Bell put it, “this added up to the conception of ‘American exceptionalism,’ the idea that, having been ‘born free,’ America would, in the trials of history, get off ‘scot free.’” America’s “common political faith” ensured that the country would “escape the ideological vicissitudes and divisive passions of the European polity.”2
America’s unique domestic politics could make its foreign policy exceptional, too. Per Bell, “In this view, too, the United States, in becoming a world power, a paramount power, a hegemonic power, would, because it was democratic, be different in the exercise of that power than previous world empires.”3 Thus, the belief that the United States is exceptional became associated with a muscular foreign policy and democracy promotion. President Barack Obama founded his version of exceptionalism on humanitarian intervention, claiming, “America is not the world’s policeman… But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act.” As he saw it, “That’s what makes us exceptional.”4
Not every country welcomes these claims. With remarkable prescience, De Tocqueville noted that a major rival to the United States was already coming into view in the 1830s. The American “combats the wilderness and savage life,” but the Russian combats “civilization with all its arms.” He continued, “the Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of the people; the Russian centers all the authority of society in a single arm. The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude.” Each “seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”5
This enmity became more acute in the past century. American Communist leader Jay Lovestone once told Joseph Stalin that the Americans had uniquely strong antibodies to collectivism, which caused the dictator to explode in rage about this “heresy of American exceptionalism.”6 Vladimir Putin despises Obama’s view of American exceptionalism as much as his mustachioed predecessor did the older one, writing to The New York Times, “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation… We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”7
President Donald Trump put his own spin on the phrase early in his presidency. In Riyadh in May 2025, he poured scorn on, “‘nation-builders,’ ‘neo-cons,’ or ‘liberal non-profits’,” arguing that “the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought about by the people of the region themselves.”8 But in his inaugural address, he stated that, “America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before.”9
The variety of views about the United States, and the heated debates between them, would not surprise the Founders. Despite the relative ethnic and religious homogeneity of early America—virtually all the settlers along the Atlantic seaboard were Anglo Protestants—internal divisions and contradictions made the founding a fraught endeavor. Indeed, devising a political settlement that could unite the colonies was the major task of American politics for the first century after independence. Even so, most of the Founding Fathers were not content with the mere survival of the country. Their ambitions were far larger.
Most Americans of the founding generation agreed that the United States was an exceptional nation. But they did not necessarily agree about what made it so. Many believed that this new experiment in self-determination and popular rule would, in time, revolutionize world politics. Some took this idea further and thought that, during their lifetime, many of the nations of the world would follow in America’s footsteps. Others hoped that independence would also liberate the United States from the global conflicts of the eighteenth century. They eventually learned that their form of government and society was exceptional, but that this new government had not made the United States an exception to the harsh realities of geopolitics.
A Decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind
By early 1776, the members of the Continental Congress began to realize that their breach with the Crown was irreparable. For much of the past year, they had argued that the British Parliament had overstepped its authority and, once King George III corrected his advisers’ mistakes, the freeborn Englishmen on the western edge of the Atlantic Ocean could lay down their arms. But as their repeated petitions and entreaties went unanswered, and the fighting continued, the delegates in Philadelphia felt that London had forced their hand. It was time to declare independence.
To win foreign support, the Congress described why the colonists had taken up arms against Britain. The resulting document shows that from the Founding, Americans have believed that their country uniquely embodies some universal principles.
The colonies had little hope of defeating the world’s preeminent power without assistance from other great powers, so the Declaration of Independence needed to both rally the deeply divided colonists and attract foreign support. Or, as the Virginia delegates put it in June 1776, “a declaration of Independence alone could render it consistent with European delicacy for European powers to treat with us, or even to receive an Ambassador from us.”10 The Declaration accordingly acknowledges at the start that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires” that the colonies “should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” This was less an attempt to win over global public opinion than an appeal to the hard men who controlled the guns, ships, and money that dominated eighteenth-century warfare.11
The first half of the Declaration’s second paragraph is so famous that any description risks an immediate descent into cliché, but there are some aspects that have heavily influenced discussions of America’s exceptional nature. The Declaration’s opening is highly unusual: few such documents at the time appealed to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” and other governments did not claim to “secure” such “unalienable Rights” as “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Moreover, the Congress asserted that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of” their citizens’ rights, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”12
These claims, that government exists to defend the natural rights of the people and that all men at all times can replace their government if it threatens those rights, were commonly held by philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic, but the Americans were the first to found their government on them. They are an astonishing way to begin a document meant to attract the support of foreign monarchs, but the colonists believed them too strongly to leave them unmentioned. Since 1776, they have inspired oppressed people and influenced major political movements all over the world.
The Congress knew that it needed to win over thrones, not salons, so much of the rest of the Declaration argues that the former colonies aimed to return to good government rather than launch a global revolution. “Prudence,” the document claims, “will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” The bulk of the Declaration is less of a philosopher’s discourse than a prosecutor’s brief, as the Congress attempts to show “the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”13
The charges? Among others, the king “has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” He “refused to pass other Laws . . . unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.” For “the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures,” he “has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records.”14
Some of these accusations sound strange to modern ears, but they capture the essence of the Founders’ views of government. Free men choosing their own leaders were among the world’s most endangered species at that time, and the colonists knew that their extinction was never far off. Few people today can imagine enduring Valley Forge, let alone standing firm in the teeth of a bayonet charge, over the location of a legislative meeting. As the Founders saw it, though, these legislatures were necessary for their communities to thrive, and they perceived impediments to their operation as a deadly threat to resist with any means at hand.
George Washington authored one of the most remarkable examples of this view nearly a year before Congress issued the Declaration. On August 10, 1775, he issued general orders to his army about some officers who had recently been court-martialed. “It is a matter of exceeding great Concern to the General,” he wrote, “to find, that at a time when the united efforts of America are exerting in defense of the common Rights and Liberties of mankind, that there should be in an Army constituted for so noble a purpose” those kinds of criminals. “It is therefore expected,” he concluded, that his men would “do their duty with that cheerfulness and alacrity, becoming Men, who are contending for their Liberty, Property and every thing that is valuable to Freemen, and their posterity.”15
These orders show that Washington’s “Glorious Cause” was fundamentally different than that of any contemporary commander. Here, the father of the country showed the soldiers the purpose of their war—to defend rights rather than royal prerogatives—and exhorted them to be worthy of it. Frederick the Great, the darling of the continental Enlightenment, could never have issued such orders. Many of the American ideas about political life originated in the mother country, but British generals did not tell their soldiers that they marched through Boston or trudged along the Scheldt to set men free.
The Founders thus championed both their natural rights and good government, which made the American Revolution distinct from later anti-monarchical and anti-colonial uprisings. Britain’s imperialism paradoxically seeded this tradition of ordered liberty all around the world, but the germ that took root along the Atlantic seaboard blossomed into the fullest expression of a worldview that has created unprecedented freedom and prosperity for countless souls.
Mugged by Reality
To state beautiful principles is one thing; as the Continental Congress discovered, to defend them is a grimmer affair. The Continental Congress wanted aid from Europe, but it also hoped to stand apart from the wars that dominated global politics at the time. It was soon mugged by reality: although the character of this new country was unique, it could not escape the grim realities of international affairs. Rather than extricating themselves from geopolitics, the Founders discovered that independence made their international position more precarious and foreign policy more important for their wellbeing.
This desire, to escape the orbit of European power politics, was less ideological than practical. The colonists had pursued this hope through decades of loyal service to the Crown, only for it to turn to ashes in their mouths. During King George’s War, New England militiamen captured Louisbourg, a port in modern Nova Scotia that French privateers had used to harass their shipping. In so doing, they thought they had proved their worth to London and freed themselves from the wars with France, only to watch horror-struck as George II traded the city back to the French at the war’s end.
After the longer (for the colonists) and more brutal French and Indian War, the colonists thought, again mistakenly, that Britain’s conquest of Canada would fulfill all of their aspirations. With France expelled from the Appalachians, they thought that they could safely move to the frontier and expand westward. But they discovered, as have people on imperial peripheries throughout history, that the center’s interests were different than theirs. From London’s perspective, North America was a money pit, and the empire bought peace with the American Indians by forbidding the colonists to move beyond the mountains. As Congress saw it, their new country could only lose out from further involvement in European great power politics.
The Continental Congress appointed a committee to draft treaties with Europe at the same time that it established another to write the Declaration of Independence. The committee’s Model Treaty shows how the Congress hoped to conduct foreign policy. John Adams, who would soon emerge as one of the country’s leading diplomats, served on both committees.16 He argued that “we should avoid all Alliance, which might embarrass Us in after times and involve Us in future European Wars.” As he saw it, “a treaty of commerce” would be “an ample Compensation to France for Acknowledging our Independence, and for furnishing Us for our money or upon Credit for a Time, with such Supplies of Necessaries as We should want.” He carried the day: to his immense satisfaction, “the Treaty passed [the Congress] without one Particle of Alliance.”17
The Model Treaty revealed how the Founders intended to affect separation from Europe. Most of the articles concern duties, fishing rights, imports, and other standard fare for a commercial treaty. A few aspects concern territory or security, though. Congress asked King Louis XVI to promise to “never invade, nor under any presence attempt to possess himself of” any of Great Britain’s North American possessions and to acknowledge that “the true Intent and meaning of this Treaty” is “that the said United States, shall have the sole, exclusive, undivided and perpetual Possession of the Countries, Cities, and Towns, on the said Continent, and of all Islands near to it, which now are, or lately were under” Britain’s jurisdiction. In exchange, Congress promised that “if, in Consequence of this Treaty,” Britain declared war on France, “the said United States shall not assist Great Britain, in such War.”18
Understandably, the French did not agree to this treaty. The colonists completely misunderstood the value of their trade, which was much lower than that of other imperial possessions. They had created one of the most vibrant middle classes in the world, and the German troops that fought for George III marveled at the wealth of the American homes they plundered.19 But the living standards of farmers in the Delaware River basin did not matter much to the sceptered heads of Europe, who wanted far greater riches than the Atlantic colonists had acquired. Thomas Pitt showed that British adventurers in India could reasonably hope that the fortunes they amassed would elevate their grandchildren into prime ministers. Sugar planters in the Caribbean could, like the Bertrams in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, also make their way into Parliament. Indeed, the revenue from the West Indies was so vital to the empire that when a Franco-Spanish armada neared the English Channel in 1779, George III wrote the First Lord of the Admiralty: “our [Caribbean] islands must be defended even at the risk of an invasion of this island, if we lose our sugar islands, it will be impossible to raise money to continue the war.”20 Needless to say, he was not nearly as concerned with the loss of the American mainland, and Louis XVI did not care that much to gain it.
The treaty that the American commissioners signed in Paris one and a half years later matched the power imbalance between the fledgling United States and France. Instead of a purely commercial treaty, the Americans acceded to a “defensive alliance,” of which the French magnanimously agreed “the essential and direct End” would be “to maintain effectually the liberty, Sovereignty, and independence absolute and unlimited of the said united States, as well in Matters of Government as of commerce.” In return, the treaty forbade either party from making a separate peace with Great Britain.21 The war dragged on two years after Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown because of France’s separate alliance with Spain, which Paris rightly regarded as more important than the one with Philadelphia. France went to war to weaken its British rival, not to advance the cause of human liberty, and Spain’s navy was more helpful than even the best American troops.
Much to John Adams’s consternation, the Americans once again failed to escape Europe’s geopolitical orbit. The United States was too weak to face off against Britain on its own, and its need for allies forced it into a global conflict that started near Boston and ended in the Bay of Bengal. The Americans were well aware of how important those allies were during the war: to celebrate the victory at Yorktown, the New Jersey government toasted, among others, “the friends of liberty throughout the world.” One of these friends was “the great and heroic Hyder Ali,” the ruler of Mysore who was fighting to halt the British East India Company’s relentless expansion across southern India.22
The Revolutionary War taught most Americans that they could not be exceptional in all respects. Even though many European monarchs found American ideological claims revolting, they could grudgingly support the Yankee fight against the British empire. Even in the age of sail, the ties across the Atlantic bound the former colonies too closely to allow them to entirely ignore Europe. This new nation, no matter how wonderful, would not be able to make itself an exception from geopolitics.
The Capacity of Mankind for Self-Government
Earning independence was a slog; preserving it presented a new set of challenges. Wartime French subsidies allowed the government to limp to the Treaty of Paris, but the Articles of Confederation’s many shortcomings were on full display in the subsequent peace. The Constitutional Convention drafted a plan for a new, more robust, federal government and the debates about ratification forced Americans to think deeply about their new country’s purpose. The authors of The Federalist Papers, which Thomas Jefferson described as “the best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written,23 show that Americans understood their new country’s global significance, which far outweighed its wealth or power. Chastened by years of fighting, they also recognized the kind of hard-headed statesmanship required to fulfill its promise.
Never one to bury the lede, Alexander Hamilton started the series by laying out the world-historical importance of the decision facing his countrymen. He tells his New York audience:
It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.24
Although the authors of The Federalist Papers believed that their country had a magnificent destiny, they focused less on how the new Constitution would empower the country to reach its potential and far more on how to prevent the country from failing. These were not denizens of the ivory tower devising ways to maximize virtues or lead the people to a desired outcome. Rather, they took human foibles and frailty for granted, and they endeavored to show how the Constitution would prevent mobs and tyrants alike from destroying the new country. James Madison argued that “the most that the convention could do” in planning out the new government “was to avoid the errors suggested by the past experience of other countries, as well as of our own; and to provide a convenient mode of rectifying their own errors, as future experiences may unfold them.”25
The Americans might have a special place in world history, but they would only make good on it if they benefited from the failures of others. “History will teach us,” he warns his countrymen, that “of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” 26, a new order of the ages, but the Federalists realized that the country had not fully broken from history.
In addition to taking human nature into account, they also had to design a government that would fit the particular people they wished to govern. “It is evident,” Madison wrote, “that no other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.”27 John Jay argued that, “this country and this people seem to have been made for each other,” and although he exaggerated the United States’s territorial and cultural unity, he tried to show New Yorkers how the Constitution was a natural fit for their circumstances.28
They had no patience for utopians. Some of the erstwhile colonists believed that the United States could dissolve without any fear of the rivalries and power politics that plagued Europe. According to this early version of the democratic peace theory, countries with the right domestic arrangements would always choose to resolve disputes peacefully, so there would be little foreign policy on a continent ruled in this manner. Hamilton summarized, “The genius of republics (say they) is pacific; the spirit of commerce has a tendency to soften the manners of men, and to extinguish those inflammable humors which have so often kindled into wars.” Those “commercial republics, like ours . . . will be governed by mutual interest, and will cultivate a spirit of mutual amity and concord.”29
Hamilton replied that this was nonsense. “To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.” Moreover, “to look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.” He continued, “Sparta, Athens, Rome, and Carthage were all republics,” yet they fought many wars. More recently, Venice, Holland, and Britain had all done their fair share of fighting—largely because of the people. “There have been, if I may so express it, almost as many popular as royal wars.” After condemning “the fallacy and extravagance of those idle theories which have amused us with promises of an exemption from the imperfections, weaknesses and evils incident to society in every shape,” he asked, “is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age, and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?”30
The Federalists eventually carried the day, and the states ratified the Constitution. The Constitution has matched the United States’s peculiar circumstances well. It has proved flexible enough to channel the energies unleashed by the Revolution to benefit the American people and their friends abroad, yet sufficiently durable to keep them united, despite the extreme stresses that led to the Civil War. Not every American has adhered to the Constitution’s framework with equal strictness or fervency, but the general respect the document attracts even today has helped the country achieve more than many of the Founders dreamed possible.
Liberty and Licentiousness
Shortly after the Americans ratified their new Constitution, the world felt the consequences of a revolution untethered from any sense of realism or history. The French Revolution threatened to overturn the established order in Europe, much to the dismay of some Americans and the delight of others. Their views largely depended on their assessment of the Revolution and how alike they thought it was to their own.
The French monarchy had staggered through most of the eighteenth century with a hodgepodge of financial expedients, but shortly after the global war that gained American independence, the money finally ran out. Louis XVI called the Estates General, a sort of parliament, in 1789, but its attempt at reform unleashed a century of pent-up grievances that toppled the monarchy. Thomas Jefferson, the American minister to France, cheered on the Revolution and tried to channel it productively. Among other things, he worked with the Marquis de Lafayette to draft a declaration of rights for the Estates General to give the king.31
Jefferson returned to the United States to serve as the first Secretary of State, where he remained one of the great champions of the French Revolution. As the revolutionaries began mass executions without trials, including of innocent people, Jefferson told a friend that he deplored these deaths, “as I should have done had they fallen in battle. It was necessary to use the arm of the people, a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs, but blind to a certain degree.” He continued, “I would [rather] have seen half the earth desolated” than see the Revolution fail.32
His view was not the only one, however. John Adams was one of the first Americans to sour on the Revolution. As he later recalled, “I knew” it “would involve France and all Europe in all the horror we have seen; Carnage and desolation for forty perhaps for a hundred years.”33 At first, Adams was nearly alone in this view. As Hamilton noted in 1794, “In the early periods of the French Revolution, a warm zeal for its success was in this Country a sentiment truly universal [emphasis in the original].” But it produced “a state of things which annihilates the foundations of social order and true liberty, confounds all moral distinctions and substitutes to the mild & beneficent religion of the Gospel a gloomy persecuting and desolating atheism.” He determined that “the French Revolution is a political convulsion that in a great or less degree shakes the whole civilized world and it is of real consequence to the principles and of course to the happiness of a Nation to estimate it rightly.”34
Hamilton and the Federalists came to view the American and French Revolutions as entirely distinct. “Would to heaven,” he lamented, “that we could discern in the Mirror of French affairs, the same humanity, the same decorum, the same gravity, the same order, the same dignity, the same solemnity, which distinguished the course of the American Revolution.” Instead, he saw “there is no real resemblance between what was the cause of America & what is the cause of France—that the difference is no less great than that between Liberty & Licentiousness.”35
Jefferson and his allies thought the Federalists were wrong about France. James Monroe wrote in 1791, “whoever owns the principles of one revolution, must cherish those of the other; and the person who draws a distinction between them is either blinded by prejudice, or boldly denies what at the bar of reason, he cannot refute.”36 Washington sent Monroe in 1794 to represent the United States in Paris, but had to recall him for opposing U.S. policy. Monroe then published a book defending his tenure and implicitly criticizing Washington. As Washington wrote in the margins of his copy, “no reasoning can justify” one of Monroe’s decisions. Mount Vernon notes there is no other such written retort in Washington’s library.37
Because so many Americans saw their greatest hopes or their worst fears emerge in France, the policy debate over France threatened to tear the nation apart. Jefferson and Hamilton built America’s first political parties in large part around this division. George Washington tended to side with Hamilton, and he decided to keep the United States as neutral as possible as Europe was engulfed. A French representative known as Citizen Genêt tried to overrule Washington by outfitting privateers in American ports, sparking a diplomatic crisis.38 Genêt lost his job when his faction lost power in Paris, but the controversy carried over into the Adams administration, when French arrogance and depredations against American shipping nearly drove the United States to declare war.39
Louis XVI’s downfall forced Americans to rethink their own convictions about their country’s role in world affairs. Most of them applauded the monarch’s replacement by a republican government. But as France veered toward the Reign of Terror, the differences between the revolutions grew clearer. Jefferson and his allies thought that the United States could begin in France a world-historical mission to transform global politics. Hamilton and the Federalists believed that the American Revolution was an exceptional one because it restored and strengthened the social order. Both believed that the United States, if preserved, would have an enormous effect across the globe. But they disagreed strongly about how to safeguard the union and use its influence.
In Practical Form, the Transcendent Truth
Despite the acrimony of the 1790s, the United States did not feel the effects of the French Revolution as keenly as its neighbors to the south. Napoleon’s conquest of Spain set off the next major round of decolonization as Spain’s weakened imperial court lost control of most of its empire in the New World.40 This was the last major foreign policy crisis for the Founding generation, and some of its younger members steered the country through the tumult. As Latin Americans struggled to win their own independence, Americans once again had to consider how similar another foreign revolution was to their own—and what to do about it. This time, the United States had the power to affect the outcome, and it defended its interests differently than in earlier crises.
Monroe, once one of the most irresponsible champions of the French Revolution, assumed the presidency after James Madison’s uneven performance during the War of 1812. He appointed John Adams’s eldest son, John Quincy Adams, as secretary of state. The younger Adams had already had a distinguished career as a diplomat. During the Revolutionary War, he accompanied his father to Europe to advocate the American cause and then joined the American mission to Russia.41 As president, George Washington sent him back to Europe and toward the end of his second term told a beaming John Adams that “Mr. Adams is the most valuable public character we have abroad;—and that there remains no doubt in my mind that he will prove himself to be the ablest, of all our diplomatic Corps.”42
He rejoined government at the right time. For the first time in its history, the United States had a power imbalance that worked in its favor. During the Revolutionary War, it utterly depended on French aid to stay in the fight. The War of 1812 ended because England had grown tired from two decades of warfare and, after burning the American capital to the ground and throwing back every American advance into Canada, found few remaining targets worth hitting. But the collapsing Spanish empire could not hold its own against the United States, and as long as Great Britain helped keep the Russian-led Holy Alliance out of the Western Hemisphere, Washington could shape events in its favor.
During his leadership of the Department of State, Adams gave one of the most famous—and misunderstood—commentaries on the Declaration of Independence’s global significance. In an Independence Day address in 1821, he stated that the Declaration:
was the first solemn declaration by a nation of the only legitimate foundation of civil government. It was the cornerstone of a new fabric, destined to cover the surface of the globe. It demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest. It swept away all the rubbish of accumulated centuries of servitude. It announced in practical form to the world the transcendent truth of the unalienable sovereignty of the people. It proved that the social compact was no figment of the imagination; but a real, solid, and sacred bond of the social union.
After quoting from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “How many ages hence / Shall this their lofty scene be acted o’er / In states unborn, and accents yet unknown?,” he continued, “It will be acted o’er, fellow citizens, but it can never be repeated. It stands, and must forever stand alone, a beacon on the summit of the mountain, to which all the inhabitants of the earth may turn their eyes for a genial and saving light.” At the end of the speech, he exhorted “every individual among the sceptered lords of humankind” to “go thou and do likewise!”43 The Revolution could not be duplicated, but its principles would govern the world.
Popular memory has reduced this speech to Adams’s comment that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” but the audience regarded it as remarkably confrontational. The Russian minister in Washington, Pierre de Poletica, reported to his home government that Adams issued “an appeal to the nations of Europe to rise against their governments,” lamenting that “it is a Secretary of State … who permits himself language like this on such a solemn occasion.”44 He hit his mark, since Adams told an admirer the speech was aimed at the Russian-led Holy Alliance that was contemplating intervening in Latin America on Spain’s side.45
As it happens, an awful lot of Americans went abroad destroying during the Latin American wars. Andrew Jackson led an American invasion of Florida, a Spanish colony, and Adams used the ensuing crisis to force Spain out of Florida and much of Texas. In 1821, he sought to restrain widespread American sympathy for the revolutions occurring to the south until he could conclude the negotiations for annexing those territories.46 In the meantime, the Americans demonstrated the plasticity of the word “neutrality.” During the wars of the French Revolution, the Washington administration strictly forbade American citizens from materially supporting France. But now, privateers commissioned by the new states of Latin America poured forth from New Orleans and Baltimore, and American money and supplies made their way south to the rebels.47 The American government did not intervene in the revolutionary wars in Latin America, but it has never had a monopoly on American foreign policy, either.
The most formidable critic of American policy was Henry Clay. The Kentuckian who later became Abraham Lincoln’s political idol knew Adams well, as the two had represented the United States in the negotiations that ended the War of 1812. Clay thought that the Latin American revolutions were the key to his “great American system” of sister republics that, he hoped, would band together and drive the Europeans out of the Western Hemisphere. The United States could then emerge as the leader of a benign neighborhood.48
Adams thought this was nuts, and he told Clay so in March 1821. As he recorded in his diary, he never doubted that Spain’s colonies would gain their independence, but “I had seen and yet see no prospect that they would establish free or liberal Institutions of Government.” Rather, “they have not the first elements of good or free government.” Instead of seeing a strategic opportunity, he “had little expectation of any beneficial result to this country from any future connection with them, political or commercial.”49 Although he was willing to press for strategic advantages where he saw them, Adams kept the Federalist view that the American Revolution was an exceptional one.
As the Latin American revolutions progressed, even a skeptic of democracy’s prospects in the former colonies like Adams discovered that American interests required the United States to support pro-democratic forces to the south. After he became president, Adams realized that the aristocracies in the newly independent states usually favored Great Britain, and the pro-democracy forces preferred working with the United States. Accordingly, his ambassador to Mexico, Joel Poinsett, helped organize the pro-democracy elements in Mexican society. The Americans were still not strong enough to take on Britain on their own, and the Mexican government eventually asked Washington to recall Poinsett.50 Other American diplomats in Chile, Peru, and Colombia encouraged those new countries to reject autocracy and become republics51 Adams did not conclude that America’s unique character required his country to topple monarchies, but he did try to tip the scales in his country’s favor where he could.
During Adams’ tenure in the State Department and the White House, the United States had the means to act more like a great power, and it did. Readers of Thucydides will recall that Greece’s democrats tended to align with Athens and its oligarchs usually favored Sparta. A similar dynamic occurred in Latin America. The competition between London and Washington sometimes grew heated, but it did not burst into full-fledged war: unlike the French revolutionaries, the Americans did not set out to revolutionize the world at the point of a bayonet. And the two capitals shared important interests, such as preventing European powers like Russia from meddling in the Western Hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine was a unilateral demand by the Americans that the Europeans stay out of Latin America, but it easily fit into Great Britain’s goals for the international system.
The Latin American wars for independence and their aftermath marked a change in American policy. For the first time, Washington could significantly affect the politics of an entire region rather than just defend its own territory and shipping. The United States could only enforce the Monroe Doctrine by tacitly partnering with Britain, which preferred a mano a mano faceoff with the Yankees over a free-for-all. The two powers then competed to shape the region to suit their preferences. Although many Americans believed that their own revolution was exceptional, they still encouraged their southern neighbors to adopt aspects of it. They only achieved mixed success, but their descendants would repeat these experiments.
Go Thou and Do Likewise!
As we have seen, the Founding Fathers realized that their revolution was unique, and that if it did not fail it would change global politics. But how it would do so, and what role Americans should play in effecting that change, was a matter of significant controversy at the time, and it still is today. Americans, their friends, and their adversaries have all weighed in with different views.
Merely figuring out their own country has often perplexed and astounded Americans, to say nothing of the inhabitants of the rest of the world. Many Americans believe that the United States is uniquely a nation of ideas; others have never heard that notion before in their lives. Half of these Yankees bristle with offense when called that word, and most of them are as far removed from cultural touchstones like the cowboy as they are from the astronaut. Their motto might as well be Walt Whitman’s observation, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”52
Analyzing this country—brawny and mercantile, democratic yet obsessed with greatness, both highly ideological and imminently practical—taxes the greatest minds, to say nothing of governing and leading it. But the country has prospered largely because it gives these competing and sometimes contradictory impulses a fair hearing. Self-styled realists roll their eyes at perorations about man’s longing for freedom, but those ideas gave Americans influence in Latin America when all the economic factors tilted toward Great Britain. Very little can happen without the wealth generated by business, but as the Continental Congress discovered during their negotiations with France, gold can only accomplish so much without the protection afforded by harder, baser steel.
The philosophical and scientific contributions the Founders gave to humanity are among the finest the world has seen. But their special genius lay in their ability to muddle through, to reconcile these competing impulses in their society, in many cases in their own minds, and after many false starts create a government that suits their people well and lets them adapt to new circumstances. At the time, self-government to defend the common rights of mankind was exceptional, and America’s “Glorious Cause” fires imaginations around the world.
The global situation has changed radically in the quarter of a millennium since the Declaration of Independence was written, and many doubt that the United States is still exceptional. Democracy is widespread, and some partisans of other countries argue that their form of self-government is higher and greater than the American one. They also note that Americans have not always lived up to their Founders’ highest aspirations or, in some cases, pursued them foolishly and at great cost to Americans and others. This would not surprise the Founders, though. As we have seen, many of their fondest hopes were dashed during their lifetimes, and they constantly compromised or overstepped as they sought to secure their country and their way of life.
But at its root, the strongest American claim to exceptionalism has never rested on any particular moral quality of this country or of its people. The United States has at times acted with magnanimity, at others with cruelty. As have most others. No country has ever relied solely on gentle suasion to survive. Hamilton encouraged his countrymen to “adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue.”53
He was not fully correct, however, when he wrote in The Federalist Papers, “the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era” in which it would be decided “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”54 That crisis, that era, continues every day of this country’s existence. Early on, there were no other realistic alternatives to rule by accident and by force; when the British-led international order collapsed, only American power could create a successor that safeguards American interests and leaves an opening for freedom to prevail.
Americans make plenty of mistakes, and the consequences of those mistakes have grown in proportion with the country’s power and influence. Developing that power and wielding that influence wisely is just as vital as it was 250 years ago. Geopolitics is hard and brutal, but getting it right is the only way to preserve America’s great achievements.
The United States is ultimately exceptional because there is no one else waiting in the wings to protect us, our friends, and our way of life. Our backs are not to the wall, but to an abyss.