It's time to reject the myth of "American Exceptionalism," and embrace a multi-polar world order.

[another_liberal]

Writing for American foreign affairs journal, The National Interest, former US National Intelligence Council officials, Mathew Burrows and Roger George call upon long overlooked NCI research reports which warn our country would be wise to soon accept we are becoming more and more one nation among equals and less and less the master of the world. Is it really smart to pretend our country is above the rules others must obey? A call to correct the direction of our foreign policy sounds like very good advice. It's time to end the unending wars, the wholesale death and the unbridled expense required to maintain an ever-growing hegemony over the world.

Snow falls on monuments at the F. D. R. Memorial, Washington D. C (AFP)


Preparing for New Reality: Will US Be a Trendsetter in Multipolar World?


Whether one likes it or not, by 2025 the international system will be a multipolar one, and Washington should prepare itself for the new reality, former National Intelligence Council (NIC) officials Mathew Burrows and Roger George underscore, citing NIC's Global Trends 2025 report published in November 2008.

"The United States will have greater impact on how the international system evolves over the next 15-20 years than any other international actor, but it will have less power in a multipolar world than it has enjoyed for many decades," the report read. "A world of relatively few conflicts with other major powers would smooth the way toward development of a multipolar system in which the US is 'first' among equals," it added.

In 2008 many US senior officials turned a deaf ear to the NIC's prognosis, regarding it as just another worst-case "guesstimate," Burrows and George note in their article for The National Interest. They refer to US presidential candidates that sound as if the United States never left "the unipolar moment."

"The challenge now is to alter our mind-set, which seems trapped in the amber of America's 'exceptionalist' tradition and 'indispensable' role," the intelligence analysts warn.

(snip)

Read more at: http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160120/1033444658/will-washington-be-trendsetter-in-multipolar-world.html

[malthaussen]

1. I wouldn't characterize American Exceptionalism as a myth.

Colloquially, "myth" is used these days to indicate something that isn't true. But the ideology of American Exceptionalism is very real. It colors just about every political discourse in the country. Agreed, "myth" strictly speaking refers to the stories a culture tells to explain itself to itself, and by that measure American Exceptionalism is quintessential myth. Neither definition really applies to the context in which the article is using the word though: they are trying to demonstrate that America is not in the present state of the world, exclusive, which actually validates the idea that it may once have been. I submit that is a dangerous perspective, and it is not the "modern" world that invalidates the "myth," but the substance of the myth itself.

-- Mal

[FSogol]

2. LOL, SputnikNews belongs in Creative Speculation. n/t