This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Originally, he was an America Firster, a phrase from the pre-World War II era deeply associated with anti-Semitism. (Yep, he arrived there years before Ye ever made it on the scene!) As an America Firster, who undoubtedly snitched the phrase from Pat Buchanan's 2000 presidential run, he even used it in his 2017 inaugural address. ("We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it's going to be only America first " America first.") Initially, however, he rejected the allied idea of American exceptionalism. As he put it at an event in Texas in 2015, "I don't like the term. I never liked it. When I see these politicians get up [and say], 'the American exceptionalism' " we're dying. We owe $18 trillion in debt. I'd like to make us exceptional. And I'd like to talk later instead of now."
And when you think about it, that was rather exceptional in its own way. After all, he was claiming " as no other politician would have dared to do at the time " that this country was anything but exceptional; that, in fact, it had to be brought back from the graveyard of history and that he was going to do so. He was going to "make America great again" (MAGA), a phrase that, in 2015-2016, no other politician, Democrat or Republican, would have dared use. Of course, his truest position was always Trump First and, in 2023, it's undoubtedly Make Trump Great Again. However, explain it as you will, he did later adopt American exceptionalism when, assumedly, he had made his country and his presidency the exception to all rules. And of course, in January 2021, he gave genuine new meaning both to "Trump first" and "American exceptionalism" when he called on his followers to attend a "big protest in D.C." that would "be wild" and support that most exceptional of all presidents, him.
In the Biden era, with the January 6th moment more or less behind us, we're back to American exceptionalism, not that most of our politicians ever truly left it in the dust. And as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, author of American Nuremberg, reminds us today, lest you think otherwise, this country does remain all too exceptional, even if in ways that couldn't be more unnerving. Let her explain. Tom
American Exceptionalism on Full Display
Why This Country Might Want to Lower Its Expectations
Let me start with a confession: I no longer read all the way through newspaper stories about the war in Ukraine. After years of writing about war and torture, I've reached my limit. These days, I just can't pore through the details of the ongoing nightmare there. It's shameful, but I don't want to know the names of the dead or examine images caught by brave photographers of half-exploded buildings, exposing details " a shoe, a chair, a doll, some half-destroyed possessions " of lives lost, while I remain safe and warm in San Francisco. Increasingly, I find that I just can't bear it.
And so I scan the headlines and the opening paragraphs, picking up just enough to grasp the shape of Vladimir Putin's horrific military strategy: the bombing of civilian targets like markets and apartment buildings, the attacks on the civilian power grid, and the outright murder of the residents of cities and towns occupied by Russian troops. And these aren't aberrations in an otherwise lawfully conducted war. No, they represent an intentional strategy of terror, designed to demoralize civilians rather than to defeat an enemy military. This means, of course, that they're also war crimes: violations of the laws and customs of war as summarized in 2005 by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
The first rule of war, as laid out by the ICRC, requires combatant countries to distinguish between (permitted) military and (prohibited) civilian targets. The second states that "acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population" " an all-too-on-target summary of Russia's war-making these last 10 months " "are prohibited." Violating that prohibition is a crime.
The Great Exceptions
How should war criminals be held accountable for their actions? At the end of World War II, the victorious Allies answered this question with trials of major German, and Japanese officials. The most famous of these were held in the German city of Nuremberg, where the first 22 defendants included former high government officials, military commanders, and propagandists of the Nazi regime, as well as the banker who built its war machine. All but three were convicted and 12 were hanged..
The architects of those Nuremberg trials " representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France " intended them as a model of accountability for future wars. The best of those men (and most of them were men) recognized their debt to the future and knew they were establishing a precedent that might someday be held against their own nations. The chief prosecutor for the United States, Robert H. Jackson, put it this way: "We must not forget that the record on which we judge the defendants today is the record on which we will be judged tomorrow."
Indeed, the Nuremberg jurists fully expected that the new United Nations would establish a permanent court where war criminals who couldn't be tried in their home countries might be brought to justice. In the end, it took more than half a century to establish the International Criminal Court (ICC). Only in 1998 did 60 nations adopt the ICC's founding document, the Rome Statute. Today, 123 countries have signed.
Russia is a major exception, which means that its nationals can't be tried at the ICC for war crimes in Ukraine. And that includes the crime the Nuremberg tribunal identified as the source of all the rest of the war crimes the Nazis committed: launching an aggressive, unprovoked war.
Guess what other superpower has never signed the ICC? Here are a few hints:
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
