The premise of American Exceptionalism has been getting quite a bit of attention lately but there's nothing new about it. You can trace it back to the policy of Manifest Destiny from previous centuries which was used in America as the justification for one of the most furious examples of human and cultural genocide in human history against the American Indians. Similarly, it's being used today for a generic campaign against Muslims hardly any of which has made any military sense with the evidence of one Middle East country after the other being left in shambles after an American invasion. Most recently we've seen the kidnapping of the Prime Minister of Libya after the American kidnapping of someone said to be a terrorist.
American Exceptionalism is the justification for going into any country anywhere to capture or kill anyone American deems a threat to America's national security. The policy has even gone to the extreme now through the NDAA (National Defense Authorisation Act) to permit the same policy inside America.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, seemingly based in England, is to publish names of civilians killed by American drone strikes. However, there's no more reason to give any credibility to the information they provide than there is in the claims by Obama that drones aren't killing many civilians at all. There's simply no way to obtain credible verification either way.
The statistics regarding drone strikes are similar to what is happening with GMO food in which the hysteria on the topic is mixed with hatred for American corporations, specifically Monsanto. The hatred is intermingled with the 'science' regarding GMO food with the result that there is little credibility to anything anyone says. However, Monsanto has within the European Union verifiably attempted to patent and control their 'own' variety of tomatoes thus limiting the genetic diversity of this fundamental food. Any such limitation is inherently destructive as diversity is the strength and life of any organism. Nevertheless, this is a different question from whether a GMO tomato is nutritionally bad for you.
Julian Assange has recently said American Exceptionalism is just an excuse to break the law. While I admire many of the things Assange has said and done, that comment is just restating the blindingly obvious. Of course America is breaking the law but the bigger question is why America thinks that is a reasonable thing to do and why it would expect anyone to accept that.
We can see what American Exceptionalism justifies but that begs the question of what justifies American Exceptionalism and there isn't anything obvious. Any idea of an American moral imperative is just nebulous hogwash and would be impossible to prove. Perhaps it goes to the idea that America won World War II but you would get just a wee bit of justifiable disagreement from Russia on this.
America was determined to stay out of the European war. Even after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America's declaration of war against Japan, America still did not declare war on Hitler. Instead, in one of a collection of incredibly stupid things Hitler did, after Pearl Harbor Hitler declared war on America thus ensuring for his armies a war on two primary fronts. That the war was won by America alone is utter rubbish and is a gross insult to the millions of Russians who died driving Hitler's armies out of Russia and all the way to Berlin. If there's any moral imperative that comes out of the victory in World War II, it seems obvious to me that it would be shared with Russia.
Although I'm about as far to the left as it is possible to get, I'm not blind to history and I have no problem with any country's need for defense. Prior to World War II, France sat behind the Maginot Line and the people ate croissants and thought they were safe. Everywhere else people sat about eating their crumb cakes while Hitler built a massive war machine and it took some while for the other countries of the world to gear up their production capacity to build the equipment and armies to fight him. Meanwhile, one country after the other fell to his Sixth Army. (Coincidentally, this at Stalingrad was the first of Hitler's armies that Russia crushed.)
That a national defense is necessary is a reasonable thing. If Scotland wants submarines to defend against invading Vikings, so what. Where that goes wrong is if Scotland suddenly believes it has some divine justification to invade anywhere else to inflict haggis on them. Given the Divine Right of Haggis and with armies led by the pipers of the Black Watch, Scotland has the moral and military imperative to bring haggis to you wherever you may live.
America has a perfect right to defend its borders but it has no right whatever to wage preemptive war. The general justification for any preemptive action is that Hitler should have been stopped but he wasn't without a full-scale war so any presentation that a preemptive war would have been effective is utter rubbish because it didn't happen. The argument that it would have worked has a massive logical flaw in that no-one knows what would have worked because no-one did it.
The fundamental problem to all of this is what will stop a modern age Hitler from gaining supremacy and thus destabilising the world again. Preemptive strikes are too far to one extreme and global war is too far to the other so what then is the answer. What indeed.
This inevitably leads to cries of the heresy to a drive toward One World Order but this is largely hyperbolic hysteria in opposition to the United Nations. I have no interest in seeing One World Order as even a cursory view of Europe will show anyone the magnificent beauty of multiple cultures. However, World Order seems to me a highly desirable goal for anyone. That cannot come as an edict from any one country or we just end up with another Hitler. He seemed benign at first ... until he started breaking down the doors of his people.
The United Nations organisation was created specifically to prevent subsequent world wars and it seems to me if there is any moral imperative in the world then it should be to empower the organisation to do exactly that. I really don't see how anyone who truly believes in democracy and the Will of the People could disagree with that.
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