Excerpt:

The blueprint drawn up on those summer weekends at the White House is a model of pragmatism — eschewing the use of force, except to respond to acts of aggression against the United States or its allies, disruption of oil supplies, terrorist networks or weapons of mass destruction. Tellingly, it does not designate the spread of democracy as a core interest.

It appears that the Administration is shifting the dominant position on American Exceptionalism from the "crusader" to the "exemplar" (per Thomas Jefferson)or more specifically the shift is from a Jacksonian foreign policy model to a Wilsonian/Jeffersonian alignment.

But I think this may be illustrative of the way the Administration is operating this term and may indicate that the President feels he was burned by past collaborative efforts involving DoD, DoS, and CIA. 

It was a tight group that included no one outside the White House, a stark contrast to Mr. Obama’s Afghanistan review in 2009, which involved dozens of officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Ms. Rice said she briefed Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel over weekly lunches.

I suspect that this will be the foreign policy and strategy model for the remainder of this term and we should consider what that means for the US and the future.

V/R
Dave

October 26, 2013

Rice Offers a More Modest Strategy for Mideast

By MARK LANDLER

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/world/middleeast/rice-offers-a-more-modest-strategy-for-mideast.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON — Each Saturday morning in July and August, Susan E. Rice, President Obama’s new national security adviser, gathered half a dozen aides in her corner office in the White House to plot America’s future in the Middle East. The policy review, a kind of midcourse correction, has set the United States on a new heading in the world’s most turbulent region.

At the United Nations last month, Mr. Obama laid out the priorities he has adopted as a result of the review. The United States, he declared, would focus on negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, brokering peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and mitigating the strife in Syria. Everything else would take a back seat.

That includes Egypt, which was once a central pillar of American foreign policy. Mr. Obama, who hailed the crowds on the streets of Cairo in 2011 and pledged to heed the cries for change across the region, made clear that there were limits to what the United States would do to nurture democracy, whether there, or in Bahrain, Libya, Tunisia or Yemen.

The president’s goal, said Ms. Rice, who discussed the review for the first time in an interview last week, is to avoid having events in the Middle East swallow his foreign policy agenda, as it had those of presidents before him.

“We can’t just be consumed 24/7 by one region, important as it is,” she said, adding, “He thought it was a good time to step back and reassess, in a very critical and kind of no-holds-barred way, how we conceive the region.”

Not only does the new approach have little in common with the “freedom agenda” of George W. Bush, but it is also a scaling back of the more expansive American role that Mr. Obama himself articulated two years ago, before the Arab Spring mutated into sectarian violence, extremism and brutal repression.

The blueprint drawn up on those summer weekends at the White House is a model of pragmatism — eschewing the use of force, except to respond to acts of aggression against the United States or its allies, disruption of oil supplies, terrorist networks or weapons of mass destruction. Tellingly, it does not designate the spread of democracy as a core interest.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/world/middleeast/rice-offers-a-more-modest-strategy-for-mideast.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=print

Putin is Afraid of American Exceptionalism: Still reeling from the Defeat of Global Communism in the War of Ideas

Putin is Afraid of American Exceptionalism

By David S. Maxwell

Journal Article | Sep 15 2013 - 1:13am

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/putin-is-afraid-of-american-exceptionalism

Putin is Afraid of American Exceptionalism:

Still reeling from the Defeat of Global Communism in the War of Ideas

David S. Maxwell

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s New York Times OpEd has stirred much emotion as he challenged the idea of American Exceptionalism.   While many are taken aback by such an affront to American values and ideals, it might be worth a brief look at some historical data points on the evolutionary trail of American Exceptionalism that culminated with the defeat of the Soviet Union in the ideological realm on the battlefield of human terrain.

As most know the roots of American Exceptionalism lie in three figures, Jonathon Winthrop, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexis de Tocqueville.  However, it was not until President Kennedy invoked the concept that it became the ideological tool for victory in the Cold War.

In 1630 Winthrop gave us the first words that laid the foundation for American Exceptionalism: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”[1]   De Tocqueville provided a quite different description of why America is exceptional: “The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one… Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people.” [2]

Thomas Jefferson vacillated between the concept of America as an exemplar and as a crusader.   Clearly his words describing inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence support the notion of America being a city on hill as the exemplar for all to emulate.  According to Walter Russell Mead Jeffersonian Foreign Policy can be described as a form of “supple pacifism” and isolationism.[3]  Yet Jefferson also felt that for America to flourish, democracy and free market economies must spread throughout the world which of course influences the crusader form of American Exceptionalism.

Jefferson’s final views can be summed up from his letter on Foreign Affairs with this excerpt: “Trusted with the destinies of this solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government, from hence it is to be lighted up in other regions of the earth, if other regions of the earth shall ever become susceptible of its benign influence.”[4]

Despite this final “benign influence” view and the roots of what Joseph Nye would later coin as “soft power,” Jefferson set America up for the continuing conflict between exemplars and crusaders.  In their seminal work,Empire of Liberty, Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson succinctly summarized Jefferson’s conflicting positions that endure today. They note that American foreign policy had two broad views:

             “…to advance liberty only by remaining separate from the world.  Only by avoiding enormous economic and constitutional threats produced by entangling alliances and foreign wars would America fulfill its mission as an example or asylum for oppressed peoples everywhere.”

 “…free political and economic institutions would flourish in America only if they took root elsewhere, an idea that has underlain much of the crusading impulse in this century.”[5] (referring to the 20th Century)

These two ideas really illustrate the exemplar and the crusader Exceptionalists.

After de Tocqueville little there was little focus on Exceptionalism until the 20th Century.  Putin is not the first to challenge American Exceptionalism.  Stalin himself used the term to criticize the American Communist Party for thinking that it did not fall in line with Marxist history because of its geographic location and access to resources, its industrial capacity along the lines of de Tocqueville’s description some 80 years earlier.[6]  Perhaps he foreshadowed what would become of the US-USSR conflict and realized that even American Communists could not divorce themselves from the unique American experience.

However, it was President Kennedy who re-invigorated and cemented the concept in American presidential lexicon that continues to this day when in 1961 in an address to the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts he called America a “shining city on a hill.”[7]  Since that time every American President, regardless of political party, has used various forms of this metaphor and invoked American Exceptionalism. 

Why did Kennedy do this?  Although political scientists and historians can challenge me because I have no hard data to prove this, I will offer the following hypothesis.  Kennedy inherited the most effective grand strategy in American history, the policy of containment of Soviet Communism.  The diplomatic, economic, and in particular the military instruments of national power were strongly represented but what Kennedy needed was an information component that would not only unite and motivate Americans but would also serve as an example for the free world.  What better way to offset Communist ideology than to describe an American ideology that would be the shining example.

Although US and Soviet forces never directly met on the field of battle during the Cold War; on the battlefield of human terrain and in the war of ideas, American ideals dominated Communism.  Democracy and free market economies spread across the globe and American soft power was one of the major influences.  Putin’s KGB was unable to counter this and today he sees the opportunity to try to obtain some satisfaction and perhaps even a form of revenge for his failures by discrediting America in the New York Times.

Of course many people criticize American Exceptionalism.  It is the subject of fierce debate among Americans.  They can be divided into three camps.  We have talked about the first two.  The crusaders are aggressive proponents of exporting American principles and following the proverbial concept of “making the world safe for democracy” because they believe it will improve the chances for global stability and economic prosperity which are obviously in U.S. interests.  The exemplars are the soft power advocates.  They believe that the American example should be sufficient for others to adopt and that the ideals do not need to be aggressively pushed.  The third category is one not yet discussed.  These are the “apologists” for American Exceptionalism.  These are people who believe the concept of American Exceptionalism is arrogant and leads to poor strategic decision-making, entangling the US in overseas adventures, and leads to conflict and harm to America.  Although critics of American Exceptionalism will deny this they see more eye to eye with Putin than with any American President since Kennedy, whether it be President Reagan or President Obama.

(Continued at the link below)

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/putin-is-afraid-of-american-exceptionalism

George Washington On The Danger Of Political Parties

Given the current dysfunctional Legislative and Executive Branches it might be useful to review George Washington's warning about the dangers of political parties.  Below is the excerpt from his farewell address that discusses these dangers and re-reading this today really illustrates how right he was in his warning.  Seems like most everything he warned against is coming true.  

I find it also ironic that so many tout the concept of American Exceptionalism and so I think we should consider John Winthrop's words:

We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when he shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God . . . .

For those who believe that the US should export Democracy, I think there are countries around the world who are watching this debacle in our Legislature and Executive branches and saying that America is not the city on the hill that they want to emulate.

I hope we all have a better New Year but I fear our government will not all us to have one.

V/R

Dave

George Washington On The Danger Of Political Parties

http://www.original-republican.com/george-washington-on-the-danger-of-political-parties/

“I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.

This Spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but in those of the popular form it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual, and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.

Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

It serves always to distract the public councils, and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.original-republican.com/george-washington-on-the-danger-of-political-parties/