The Atlantic: Do Republicans Still Think America Is Exceptional?

By Peter Beinart: 

It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of Trump’s remarks. NATO, the military alliance that underpins the post-World War II order, rests on the principle that if one member is attacked, the others will come to its aid. Saying that the United States may or may not abide by that principle is the military equivalent of saying that the United States may or may not default on its national debt (which Trump has also said). Were Trump elected, these comments alone would reshape the geopolitics of Eastern Europe, as regional leaders began cozying up to Russia out of fear that the United States wouldn’t defend them. (Especially in the wake of Brexit, which has already weakened NATO.)

Trump’s comments mark a massive shift within the GOP. Since the 1940s, solidarity with the Baltic states has been a passion of the American right. Throughout the Cold War, conservatives railed against Franklin Roosevelt’s abandonment of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to Soviet domination at the 1945 Yalta Conference. In 2012, Mitt Romney traveled to Poland to emphasize the Republican argument that President Obama had sold out Eastern Europe in an attempt to curry favor with Vladimir Putin. Think about that for a second. Obama, who this year agreed to deploy NATO battalions to the Baltic states, is still widely derided inside the GOP as insufficiently committed their security. Yet the Republican presidential nominee has now implied that America shouldn’t defend them at all.

But if Trump’s comments about the Baltics constituted his sharpest policy deviation, his comments about Turkey were his most astonishing ideologically. Asked about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s massive crackdown on dissent in the wake of a failed coup, Trump asked, “How are we going to lecture when people are shooting policemen in cold blood?” He added that, “When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I don’t think we are a very good messenger.”

To grasp how extraordinary those sentences are, it’s worth remembering that Republicans have spent the last seven years accusing Obama of not believing in “American exceptionalism.” Over and over, GOP politicians and conservative pundits have suggested that the core problem with Obama’s foreign policy—the reason he’s presiding over America’s global retreat—is that he doesn’t believe America is any better than other countries. In 2010, Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a widely discussed National Review cover story arguing that Obama’s lack of faith in American superiority threatened “America’s civilizational self-confidence.” In 2011, Newt Gingrich wrote an entire book about the Obama administration’s assault on American exceptionalism.

The Full Story (July 21, 2016)