American exceptionalism

Friday

Daniel McCarthy

What Britain taught us

From our US edition

Being in Britain around the Fourth of July is always an odd experience for an American. It was especially awkward to be at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in London a week before the 250th anniversary of US independence. ARC is a British organization whose massive annual conference – about 4,000 people this year – is styled as a kind of counter-Davos, an international gathering of center-right types including a heavy representation of Americans. Given the timing, various speeches by gracious British hosts praising their American guests’ homeland – and by Americans themselves praising the principles of their revolution against the British two and a half centuries ago – were to be expected. But that didn’t diminish the cognitive dissonance.

Thursday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

The age of American unexceptionalism

From our US edition

Our administration would have us believe that Joe Biden is the leader of the free world. But he isn’t — and our relative inaction on Ukraine should firmly put to rest the idea of “American exceptionalism.” While Ukrainians were heartened by British prime minister Boris Johnson’s April trip to Kyiv, our commander-in-chief has adopted a different strategy for this active war zone: send in the women. Security concerns are ostensibly to blame for Biden being MIA, but sending in three of the country’s most important ladies — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Kyiv, First Lady Jill Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to neighboring countries in Eastern Europe — seems an odd way to demonstrate that the administration is worried about security.

unexceptionalism

Thursday

Andrew Roberts

Have Americans got George III all wrong?

From our US edition

Americans are rarely accused of underestimating themselves, but might they in fact be a greater people than they think? That thought has regularly occurred to me over the past three years while I was researching and writing my new biography of their last king, George III, and especially when I read Richard Brookhiser’s insightful comment in his recent book Give Me Liberty, where he points out that Britain’s thirteen American colonies in the 1760s and early 1770s were among “the freest societies in the world.

George iii

Monday

Andrew Bacevich

End of empire

From our US edition

The end of World War Two inaugurated the era of American dominion, with the United States politically, economically and militarily the most powerful nation on the planet. Yet throughout the subsequent period of American global ascendency, the American people endured a seemingly endless sequence of domestic crises, upheavals and disasters. Primacy abroad did not insulate them, convinced of their unique place in human history, from the trials and tribulations routinely befalling other, more ‘ordinary’ nations. Yet neither did trials at home undermine the deep-seated belief that history had summoned the United States — and no one else — to lead the world.

empire