My Kind of American Exceptionalism

Today on Foreign Policy, David Rothkopf has penned a column entitled Power Paradox: Why America Can Only Be Great by Being Unexceptional. In it, he sympathizes Vladimir Putin's op-ed assault on American exceptionalism, although Rothkopf's arguments manage to be misguided without descending to the level of Soviet hilarity that Putin achieved. Rothkopf writes,

As the president himself has asserted as recently as his U.N. General Assembly speech, the United States believes that it alone among nations has the right to go "on a break" from international law whenever it suits us. This is the fundamental dimension of American exceptionalism.

I don't often put on my Obama-defender hat, but Rothkopf's interpretation is remarkably unfair. What the President said was

While the U.N. was designed to prevent wars between states, increasingly we face the challenge of preventing slaughter within states...I have made it clear that even when America’s core interests are not directly threatened, we stand ready to do our part to prevent mass atrocities and protect human rights.

In other words, when international law is held up as an excuse for passivity in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide, America will consider doing what is right, not what is legal according to an incoherent regime that is mainly honored in the breach by those who seek legitimacy for their crimes, not protect the innocent (cf. Putin, Vladimir).