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Stephen Wertheim Profile picture
@stephenwertheim
Aug 24, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
If the Trump campaign wants to "Teach American Exceptionalism," it might start by teaching the president: foreignaffairs.com/articles/unite…
The irony is that Trump forged a fresh and resonant message by rejecting exceptionalism in 2016. In place of confident exceptionalism, Trump offered insecure nationalism, casting the United States as a global victim.
But since his State of the Union in February, Trump has opted to wrap his arms around exceptionalism: "Our ancestors built the most exceptional republic ever to exist in all of human history, and we are making it greater than ever before."
For those attracted by his original pitch, Trump's turnabout marks a failure to turn the United States into a nation among nations — neither indispensable to global order nor exploited by others.
And it marks a triumph of Trump's vanity over his ideas, since four years of Trump's tenure in office have supposedly sufficed to turn the United States from a backward, suffering country into the greatest ever.
The contradiction is encapsulated in Trump's vacillation between slogans in this campaign: is it Make America Great Again or Keep America Great?

The answer so far: keep America being made great again.
To wit:

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More from @stephenwertheim

Stephen Wertheim Profile picture
Oct 28, 2024
Is there a new China consensus in Washington? Both parties agree that “engagement,” the conceptual framework that guided U.S. policy from Clinton to Obama, is over.

But the contest to replace engagement is ongoing, and it’s not clear which alternative will prevail.

Thread:
Engagement was a conceptual framework: it supplied an overarching logic to orient individual policies and was articulated to all parties, including the Chinese government and the American public.
Since Obama, both political parties have formed a consensus to do away with engagement (rightly so, in my view).

But what positive framework should replace engagement? That’s far from clear. Getting tough on China is not a framework.
Read 11 tweets
Stephen Wertheim Profile picture
Jul 3, 2024
Washington’s biggest mistake with NATO began as a smashing success.

In the 1990s, the United States devised a brilliant method to enlarge the alliance that frontloaded benefits and backloaded costs — leaving it ill-prepared today to contend with the latter. 1/
When the Clinton administration initially sought to expand NATO, it faced daunting obstacles. Cold War divisions were supposed to be healing, but Moscow opposed the enlargement of an alliance historically aimed at Russia. 2/
If the alliance were going to expand, many central and eastern European governments wanted a way in, rather than being stuck forever on the wrong side of Europe’s new dividing line. 3/
Read 14 tweets
Stephen Wertheim Profile picture
Apr 15, 2024
The main challenge for U.S. foreign policy today isn't Trump, and it isn't Biden. It is that the longstanding pursuit of global military dominance has run headlong into the problems of overcommitment, overstretch, and domestic discontent.
The United States is overcommitted because over eight decades, and especially after the Cold War, it has issued defense guarantees to dozens of countries, not of all which are truly essential to the security, prosperity, and freedom of the American people and the American polity.
The United States is overstretched because it no longer has the material resources to meet multiple plausible military contingencies at once, especially to wage wars against China and Russia simultaneously.
Read 7 tweets
Stephen Wertheim Profile picture
Mar 6, 2024
Years in the making, my history of how the concepts of internationalism and isolationism came to be used in American politics, centering on the 1930s and 1940s, is finally out — just as commentators keep nonsensically warning that “isolationism” is somehow on the march.
Despite the ubiquity of the terms internationalism and isolationism in politics and scholarship alike, no one had comprehensively investigated how these categories came into being, and to what effect.
Here's what I found.

1. Internationalism, a nineteenth century term, long preceded the widespread usage of isolationism. Associated with peace and cooperation, it meant seeking to stay out of, or transform, the system of power politics and war centered in Europe. Image
Read 12 tweets
Stephen Wertheim Profile picture
Jun 18, 2023
For decades, U.S. officials have widely recognized that enlarging NATO, especially to Ukraine, ran at least some risk of putting the United States on a collision course with Russia. Below are some quotations that I didn't have room to include in my piece. nytimes.com/2023/06/16/opi…
This should go without saying, but I share these quotations not to excuse Russia's inexcusable, aggressive invasion of Ukraine, or to treat NATO enlargement as the sole or main cause of anything, but to promote the clear-eyed understanding needed to make decisions going forward.
George Kennan, 1998: "'I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely . . . . Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are." nytimes.com/1998/05/02/opi…
Read 11 tweets
Stephen Wertheim Profile picture
Jun 17, 2023
The argument of my piece is precisely that Russian imperialism was a major reason why Moscow opposed NATO expansion. Russian imperialism and NATO enlargement were mutually reinforcing factors — not the either/or that so many commentators today claim.
Thus I disagree with some former policymakers like Michael McFaul who claim that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has "nothing to do" with NATO. It's not either/or. Enlarging NATO threatened Moscow's claim to an imperial sphere of influence in Ukraine and beyond.
Enlarging NATO also threatened the longstanding Russian desire for a security buffer in Eastern Europe. This strategic rationale went hand in hand with an imperial one, and the two became intertwined.
Read 6 tweets

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