“No matter how much American foreign policy may be
caricatured as overly idealistic, the country’s rhetorical commitment to a
liberal international order and support for democracy around the world have
provided a principled basis for continuing involvement in international
affairs. It has focused U.S. attention on abuses of power abroad that are
actually susceptible to U.S. influence. It has also facilitated
democratic transitions in places such as Chile, the Philippines, and South
Korea.”
– Francis Fukuyama, The Washington Post, September
13, 2026, “How realism gets the world profoundly wrong.”
There is no greater myth regarding American
exceptionalism than the view that only the United States has always seen the
promotion of “liberal democracy” as part of its national identity. In
actual fact, the United States pledges itself to “liberal democracy” the world
over only when its military designs are compromised or stymied. The model
was President Woodrow Wilson’s “war to end all wars” during World War I.
When Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany in 1917, he
famously stated that the “world must be made safe for democracy.”
Wilson understood that the American people were not
interested in a conflict as part of a larger geopolitical battle but would
rally around the idea of a moral crusade to permanently eliminate militarism
and establish a lasting global peace. President Franklin Roosevelt had
the same challenge in trying to bring the United States into World War II, when
the nation was reluctant to do so.
President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq is the best
example of the myth of liberal democracy: he used a lie regarding weapons of
mass destruction to justify the use of force, and when there were no nuclear
weapons to be found, he bleated that U.S. forces were there to create liberal
democracy as a paradigm not only for Iraq, but for the entire Arab world.
Donald J. Trump used the same template for the use of
force in Iran: he argued that we were trying to prevent the development of
nuclear weapons but then switched to introducing liberal democracy as a
justification for an illegal and immoral war. The example of Venezuela is
classic: Trump talked about democratic reform and regime change, but his
real designs were on the country’s oil and gold.
Fukuyama’s most risible assumption is that the United States has never been “simply trying to maximize its power.” If that were so, then why would the United States develop a far-flung network of 750 military bases and facilities in more than 80 countries and territories in the wake of World War II?
And why would the United States engage in regime
change and attempt assassinations in countries that were trying to genuinely
democratize, such as Iran and the Congo in the 1950s or Chile in the 1970s?
And why would the United States engage in disinformation in order to justify
the use of military force against Iraq in 2003 or Iran in 2026? The list
goes on and on.
Fukuyama is no stranger to the mythology regarding
“liberal democracy.” In 1992, he wrote The End of History and the Last
Man, which argued that the end of the Cold War marked the triumph of
Western liberal democracy and the end point of humanity’s ideological
evolution. Fukuyama believed that the fall of communism and the Soviet
Union marked “liberal democracy” as the “final and best form of human
government.” He concluded the “no superior ideological system will
challenge liberal democracy as the ideal model for society.”
Myths regarding U.S. exceptionalism and liberal democracy
prevent the United States from having a real debate about our national security
goals. Specious American alarmism is designed to capture support for the
use of force in scenarios that don’t advance our geopolitical or international
interests. In an effort to increase defense spending, moreover, we
exaggerated the Soviet threat during the Cold War, and now we are exaggerating
the China threat.
Phony threat assessments lead to mistaken notions about
the nature of the threat, the demand for a costly policy of “containment,” and
the global military posture that currently exists. There are perils to be
faced regarding climate change, energy issues, and threats to the environment,
but they require diplomacy and multinational consultation, not military force.
Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the
Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins
University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure
of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National
Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A
Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books
are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing,
2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing,
2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.
