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Essay Excerpt / Exceptionalism : America the Exempt /
When Samantha Power won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for her book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, she remarked, “There has never been a more important time to think about America’s role in the world, about U.S. foreign policy, and about responsible citizenship.” These words grow truer by the year. It is time, Power argues, to redefine a course charted during the nation’s earlier days.
In 1796 George Washington, calling himself “an old and affectionate friend” of the new republic, published his Farewell Address to the nation. Two hundred and twelve years later, it is one of the most oft-cited testimonials to the phenomenon of America’s “exceptionalism,” its durability, and its alleged invincibility.
Washington passed on his reflections in the hopes that the American people would avoid what he called the “destiny of nations” – the path of degeneration, tyranny, and war. He urged the new country’s leaders and citizens never to forgo the “advantages of so peculiar a situation” as that in which the United States found itself.
When he outlined those advantages, Washington sketched three core assumptions about the United States that persisted into the 21st century: that America is blessed by exceptional geography, exceptional virtue, and exceptional democratic institutions.
In America / Essays / Samantha Power