American exceptionalism trashed at CWA

As a CU grad who has spent some serious time taking classes in the ATLAS building's black box theater, I should have known that for any Conference on World Affairs panel scheduled there, it would be wise to arrive early. Unfortunately, thanks to a horrendous, CWA-induced parking nightmare, I arrived to the "Art on the Fly: The Importance of Play" panel 10 minutes after it started. They were piping the audio from the theater into the hallway, and there were maybe two or three dozen people outside the black box listening to what sure sounded like a fascinating panel.

I ended up trekking over to another packed house at Old Main, where the panel titled "American Exceptionalism and the Nature of Foreign Policy" was already underway. The panelists, American University professor Gordon Adams, journalist Robert Dreyfuss and activist Zulfigar Ahmad, were discussing the idea that America is the greatest country ever and must police the world until all the other countries meet our high moral standards.

Ahmad was discussing the concept of manifest destiny — the old idea that some god wanted America to span from the east coast to the west coast. He said that the idea of manifest destiny has repeated itself in many forms, from the Monroe Doctrine to the Cold War. That America has the right to do whatever it wants because it is the greatest country in the world is now the underlying assumption behind most American foreign policy, Ahmad said, and that must change.

"I think that for the United States, at this moment in history, it is imperative that it completely reorient its foreign policy in that whatever they do, it should be done with one thing in mind: what kind of world the U.S. wants to live in when it is not the sole superpower ... that is the kind of world U.S. will need to make," Ahmad said, a statement of which the audience audibly approved.

A CU student posed the first question of the Q-and-A and asked panel members for their thoughts on the U.S. intervention in Libya. The panel members expressed their general disapproval of the action, for differing reasons. After a question about Afghanistan, another student once again pressed the Libya issue, asking when the U.S. should intervene militarily in foreign policy situations regarding human rights.

The answers were slightly more nuanced. Dreyfuss questioned the implications of the so-called "Obama Doctrine," referring to Obama's justifications for getting involved in Libya.

"It scares me when Obama says we can and will act unilaterally when we have to, and that we will act when we have to defend our values," Dreyfuss said, adding, "I react very cautiously to humanitarian interventionism."

Adams added that the only country with the military capacity to enforce a doctrine of humanitarian interventionism is the United States, and that he found the emerging idea of foreign affairs being driven by a "need to protect" to be "a very intriguing and a very dangerous notion."

"Establishing the boundaries on who decides what and how it happens ... is not at all settled," Adams said.