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US Foreign Policy and Human Rights: Change and Complexity

U.S. political leaders have long talked about the country as an exceptional nation, a shining city on a hill, whose divinely blessed destiny was to lead the world to greater freedom and democracy (Lipset, Smith, Ignatieff). This constructed role or self-image of American exceptionalism certainly did not preclude periods of isolationism or considered self-restraint in which the country indeed did not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The liberal revolutions of 1848 in Europe did not attract active U.S. support, nor did the rise of Hitler attract its early active opposition. Moreover this U.S. self-constructed image of divinely ordained American exceptionalism, at least rhetorically linked to the notion of freedom, did not preclude the ethnic cleansing if not genocide of Native Americas, slavery and segregation, the Alien and Sedition Acts to suppress dissent, the Palmer Raids to suppress the American left in the World War I era, the internment of innocent Japanese-Americans during World War II, McCarthyism and the suppression of free speech during the Cold War, support for various brutal dictators during that Cold War, the Phoenix Program of torture and murder in Vietnam, and various other manifestations of morally dubious and illiberal policies. But, as various authors have sagely noted, nationalism and especially chauvinistic nationalism requires a great deal of selective memory and belief in things that are just not so (Gellner, Anderson, Renan, Hobsbawm).