A city in the middle of a plain? American exceptionalism and the Trumpian challenge

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Despite his campaign promises, and for all his rhetorically disruptive and unpredictable conduct of foreign policy, Donald Trump did not break away from his predecessors as radically as is generally assumed. His policy of retrenchment in the Middle East, for instance, followed Obama’s just as his brutal unilateralist outlook was a sequel to George W. Bush’s first term. Donald Trump’s most transgressive move, then, may have been his rejection of American exceptionalism. Never since the early 1940s has a president refused to contemplate the US as the leader of democracies and to promote – if only through discourse – human rights. The concept of exceptionalism rested on the belief that the United States was uniquely blessed and ought to be a provider of peace, stability and other services for the global commonweal as well as for its own interests. Trump’s “America First” policy, it seems, tolled the knell of that concept and it is too early to know how easy or hard it will prove for his predecessors to revive.