The last, best hope? The perils of American exceptionalism.

Two weeks after the 9/11 tragedy, President George W. Bush said "The people who did this act on America and who may be planning further acts are evil people.... That's all they can think about, is evil. And as a nation of good folks, we're going to hunt them down." A year later, in the preface to his new National Security Strategy, the president enumerated the "values of freedom" that he believes are "right and true for every person, in every society." And long after the Iraq war had turned out to be not as easy, popular, or justifiable as predicted, Bush said that "the United States is the beacon for freedom in the world.... And I believe we have a duty to free people." The statements have become grander (at last month's Republican National Convention, the president said "we have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom") but all rely on the popular belief in American "exceptionalism." This is the idea that the United States is somehow unique in history, an entirely new and progressive society based on eternal, transcendent values, which it is the country's destiny and duty to spread to the rest of the world. The United States is, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "the last, best hope of earth."

Certainly the United States has been a champion of freedom, particularly in the defeat of Nazism and Soviet totalitarianism. And in the wake of 9/11, even without Bush's rhetorical effusions, it was natural that Americans should come together to reaffirm core values and to oppose barbarism and intolerance. A decade prior to 9/11, the end of the cold war and America's apparent triumph had already produced a popular discourse about the "end of history" and unprecedented U.S. moral prestige. But as wielded by the Bush administration in our "war on terror," American exceptionalism has become a belligerent posture that is winning us new enemies while losing us old friends, one that is endangering rather than strengthening America.

Far from toning down its rhetoric after the failure to find WMD in Iraq, the revelations at the Abu Ghraib prison, and other events that have made the "mission" there seem less than idealistic, the Bush administration has turned to religious language to shore up its claims. The president has repeated over and over that "freedom is not America's gift to the world. Freedom is God's gift to every person in the world." In his April 13 press conference, he coupled this with claims that "we're changing the world" and "we're freeing people." Thus the syllogism completes itself: Freedom is God's gift; we are freeing people; therefore we are doing God's work. Is it surprising if others get the impression that we think we're God's gift to the world?

George W. Bush did not invent this line of thinking. It goes back to the Puritan notion of America as a "city on a hill." Historian George Bancroft observed in 1853 that we "follow the steps by which a favoring Providence, calling our institutions into being, has conducted the country to its present happiness and glory." Bancroft's view was solidified by other historians over the next hundred years until it became, in the words of sociologist Robert Bellah, a "civil religion."

To be sure, many nations have a chauvinistic view of themselves--the French, who coined the word, are often singled out, but they are far from alone. "France cannot be France without greatness," Charles de Gaulle said. But even at their most arrogant, Europeans do not claim that their nations are chosen by God from "beyond the stars" to be the model for the rest of the world. A special set of circumstances led to America's distinctive form of national pride, including settlement by groups fleeing religious persecution; the lack of an aristocracy and emphasis on equality in the "nation of immigrants"; and, of course, the now debunked notion of an "empty" continent with no history at all, set aside by Providence for a great experiment.

In Of Paradise and Power (Alfred A. Knopf), neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan, a strong backer of the war in Iraq, admits that the United States has tended to view itself as an "exception" to international law, and that at times it is even willing to "set aside legal and institutional constraints" in the pursuit of its interests. Traditionally, such apparent breaches of principle have been justified by America's unique "calling." But now, according to Kagan, there is a "crisis of legitimacy" brought on by the Europeans' refusal to condone actions like the Iraq war and by their insistence on multilateralism, hobbling the West in its efforts to defend liberal democracy. Yet Kagan says that "to address today's global threats America will need the legitimacy that Europe can provide." He thus admits that some of our actions violate liberal Western principles, but criticizes others for not approving them. In the end, Kagan seems to suggest that Europe should simply trust that America's goals are the right ones.

Surely it is a fallacy to believe that the American national interest by definition embodies transcendent human values--that the cause of America is "the cause of all mankind," as Benjamin Franklin put it. History, at least, should tell us otherwise. For example, the United States justified the Spanish-American War as expelling a corrupt Old World empire from the Americas--and then wound up paying Spain $20 million for the Philippines, where we would later prop up dictator Ferdinand Marcos. When George W. Bush says that America "remains the hope of the oppressed and the greatest force for good on this Earth," some of those oppressed in the Middle East remember that the United States connived at the overthrow of democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddeq in Iran in 1953, ushering in the Shah, and that it later funded and armed Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Some of the "exceptions" we make for ourselves are also self-defeating. A whole slew of treaties--land mines, the international criminal court, global warming--have been scrapped by the Bush administration. Worse, Bush's National Security Strategy vowed to "cooperate with other nations to deny, contain, and curtail our enemies' efforts to acquire dangerous technologies." Yet on July 31, 2004, the administration that terrorized us with the image of rogue regimes armed with WMD--the "smoking gun" that comes "in the form of a mushroom cloud"--announced at the UN Conference on Disarmament that it would oppose an inspection-and-verification component for a treaty limiting the production of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium, saying it was inadequate and too expensive. According to the New York Times, the decision "virtually kills a ten-year international effort to lure countries such as Pakistan, India, and Israel into accepting some oversight of their nuclear production programs." The administration argued that verification would cost too much. One wonders whether it would cost, say, $87 billion--the most recent appropriation for the war in Iraq. At what point does avoiding the very terrors we have been browbeaten with since 9/11 become "unaffordable"? Still, Bush told the GOP convention that "I will never relent in defending America--whatever it takes."

What if it takes altering our view of ourselves? It will be difficult to form global partnerships to fight terror and build just societies if we continually remind our potential partners that we are superior and not bound by the same rules they are. As UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has said, "Those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it, and those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it."

Neither international law nor the United Nations Charter allows for a country to export its political system to others, and certainly not through war. It may be reassuring to some Americans to think of our country as above the community of nations and beyond the footling machinations of minor states. But the tendency to think we can ignore history and the feelings of others leads to gross miscalculations, like the failure to anticipate Iraqi resentment of American occupation. Kagan may be right that "it is reasonable to assume that we have only just entered a long era of American hegemony." It is also reasonable to conclude that the rest of the world will fight this hegemony tooth-and-nail--at the UN, on the Internet, in the vastly expanded media, through polls, in grass-roots networks and boycotts, and, unfortunately, through violence. Other people may accept, under duress, that the United States is the most powerful nation. But it is unlikely that they will accept the premise that we are the best nation that has ever existed, with a providential right to dictate to others.

Adopting a more skeptical attitude to American exceptionalism, both the theory and its manner of expression, will not make America less noble or more vulnerable. Instead, it will help to open our eyes to the remarkable global movement toward democracy, a movement led by millions of individuals, not by the sole superpower. It was not Americans who tore down the Berlin Wall or faced down tanks in Tiananmen Square. The issue is not whether American values are "right and true for every person, in every society," as President Bush seems to think. Rather, the issue is the fundamental appeal of democracy: where every person in every society gets to have a say in what the values of his or her society are--free from internal and external coercion. George W. Bush may be correct that "millions in the Middle East plead in silence for their liberty"; they do not necessarily plead to him, or us.

Bruce F. Murphy is a poet, essayist, and freelance writer. His most recent book is The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Murder (St. Martin's Press).