The Battle for the Soul of U.S. Foreign Policy

There has been a lot of back and forth in the press about American exceptionalism and the potential (or reality) of American decline. I think the key to understanding these various debates isn't the relative merits of the specific arguments but how they fit into the larger debate about the role America should play internationally. Those who are chaffing against arguments that America is declining do so not because they disagree that China's economy may eventually eclipse ours or that there will be more nuclear weapons states in 10 years, but because they view such an assessment as an implicit threat to interventionism. If American power is on the wane, it would appear reckless to employ it in all but the most dire emergencies.

Likewise, the umbrage that's been taken at President Obama's apologies and recognition of past misdeeds is less about historical validity than about what this recognition would mean for the cause of global hegemony. It's much more difficult to play the global supercop if there are repeated challenges to your moral authority.

The same dynamic works in reverse, as those who hold up America's decline tend to do so because they want to restrain Washington's adventurism abroad. They emphasize America's sins not because they believe we are uniquely evil in the world, but because they want to pop the bubble of sanctimony that sustains the interventionists.