It’s no accident that President Obama began and ended his State of the Union address with strong words of praise for the U.S. military. In the middle of that “compliment sandwich” he lathered on a special sauce of American exceptionalism, full of tributes to American values of hard work and fair play and to American qualities of innovation, ingenuity, and productivity. “Our workers are the most productive on earth,” he declared at one point, “and if the playing field is level, I promise you – America will always win.”
American military superiority and American exceptionalism – a potent combination made to order for a nation still reeling from a near economic collapse and from a decade of counter-insurgency warfare fraught with shifting objectives and inconclusive results.
Why does America need to proclaim itself better than the rest of the world? Does America have to win always? If America were a person with this attitude, we would probably think he was a megalomaniac or a bully or both – at the very least, not a person secure in his own skin.
The rhetoric of American exceptionalism has a long history but, in this day and age, it does seem to mask an underlying, deep-seated anxiety. While politicians trumpet our superiority over the rest of the world, middle-class Americans have been seeing their incomes, benefits, and job security decline even as wealth and living standards in developing countries like China appear to be be skyrocketing.
Once again, it’s no accident that exceptionalist rhetoric goes hand in hand with military might. As I wrote in an earlier post, there’s an age-old school of thought that national greatness feeds on blood. To be exceptional the nation has to shed blood – lots of it. The folks who have made this argument weren’t fanatics. Some of them were ministers who preached the gospel of love. Obama is no fanatic either, but he plays the cards he’s dealt.
In one respect the U.S. is without question exceptional. Its military budget is five times larger than China’s, the next largest. Even more astonishingly, if you add up China’s military budget and the next 19 largest national military budgets, the U.S. military budget is still larger than all of these nations’ military expenditures combined.
Maybe one day we can rethink what it means to be exceptional, and decouple it from militarism. But that is going to take all the hard work, ingenuity, and innovation that America can muster – and then some.




