Musings on the Limits of Power and the End of American Exceptionalism

By Rudy Barnes, Jr., July 26, 2025

Andrew Bacevich acknowledged the limits of national power and the end of American exceptionalism in his 2009 book, The Limits of Power.  Like Bacevich, I’m a retired Army officer who has recognized the limits of national power and the requirements of military legitimacy, and how they were ignored in the Viet Nam war and subsequent American military interventions.

Since WWII America has been considered the undisputed standard of libertarian democracy and its essential moral requirements.  But after Americans elected Donald Trump President in 2016 and 2024, Trump has corrupted America’s moral exceptionalism and political legitimacy as described by Margaret McMillan and David Brooks and cited below in the Notes.

Religion is considered the source of the moral standards of legitimacy, and Christianity is the dominant religion in America.  Thomas Jefferson considered the teachings of Jesus “the most sublime moral code ever developed by man.”  While Trump’s narcissistic morality is the antithesis of the altruistic teachings of Jesus, most white Christians voted for Trump.

The church has proven that it cannot or will not be a moral steward of democracy.  That leaves the Constitution as the standard of legitimacy for American democracy, and voters in America have twice voted for a President committed to reshaping the Constitution to expand his executive powers and to reduce the checks and balances of Congress.

Until Trump was elected, promoting democracy seemed a worthy priority of U.S. foreign policy  But Russia and Israel are both putative democracies, and Putin’s unprovoked attacks in Ukraine and Netanyahu’s IDF killing of over 50,000 Palestinians in Israel and Gaza require shifting priorities to protecting human rights rather than supporting demagogues in democracies.

Trump has seriously compromised the effectiveness of American power both at home and overseas, but American voters can reset those priorities after Trump leaves office.  If Trump doesn’t comply with Constitutional term limits, then enforcing those term limits and opposing demagogues like Putin and Netanyahu should be America’s top foreign policy priority.

American exceptionalism is history, but American voters can and must make sure that its democracy remains consistent with the Constitution.  Americans should make preserving universal human rights and opposing the war crimes of oppressive demagogues like Putin and Netanyahu their top priorities, and relearn the essentials of diplomacy.  

After Trump leaves office, America should conform its foreign policy to the Constitutional standards that once made America a great nation.  In the process Americans may discover that promoting freedom and protecting universal human rights in democracy can be the most dangerous idea in human history.  But better late than never.        

Notes:

Margaret McMillan has described Trump’s handling of America’s international relations as  Making America Alone Again and as American Carnage: A history that offers few parallels for Trump’s repudiation of America’s own alliances.  She has  described it as American Carnage.“ In Trump’s world, mutual trust and respect, so hard to establish and so easy to destroy, do not matter. Yet nations, like individuals, have long memories of past wrongs or defeats, as Trump himself should know. Trust among individuals or nations is hard to measure, but lasting and productive relations cannot exist without it. During the Cold War, negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States over arms control were tortuous and drawn out because neither side trusted the other. Incidents such as the American pilot Gary Powers’s intercepted U-2 flight over the Soviet Union in 1960 or the Soviet shooting down of the Korean airliner in 1983 were read by the other side as evidence of malign intent. By contrast, although there were certainly tensions between the United States and its allies, each generally assumed their counterparts were acting in good faith, and there was a willingness to discuss tricky matters and search for mutually acceptable solutions that no longer exists today and cannot be easily or quickly rebuilt. The Western alliance could be joining the list of ones that failed. Being the world’s greatest military power is a heavy burden, and partly as a result, the U.S. debt continues to grow to staggering levels.  Ambitious powers, China in particular, are pouring resources into an arms race that gets ever more expensive. And, as has happened many times before, other nations are tempted to abandon the old power for the new or group against it to take advantage of what they see as its decline. If Trump’s current hostility to alliances continues and the administration keeps insulting, belittling, and even economically harming its long-standing partners, the United States is going to find the world an increasingly unfriendly place. Former allies or uncommitted powers may decide that Putin’s Russia is a better bet; others may bypass the United States with new trade arrangements or, as is happening with European nations and Canada, sharing in their own military production, planning, and mutual deterrence, on the assumption that the United States is no longer a dependable ally. The British once called their position in the world “splendid isolation” until they realized the costs were too high. Trump’s United States may find that, in the dangerous twenty-first century, those splendors are overrated.” See Making Americans Alone Again at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/north-america/making-america-alone-again#

Using a similar idiom as that of McMillan, David Brooks has described Trump’s foreign Policy as Winning the Race to the Bottom. Comparing the U.S. positive responses to the USSR’s Sputnik in 1957 with  dramatic technological developments, to Trump’s negative response of building walls of punitive tariffs to current Chinese efforts to outpace U.S. technological dominance in space, See https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opinion/trump-america-china.html.  

On The Moral Failure of the Church and Democracy in America, see https://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2025/07/musings-on-moral-failure-of-church-and.html.

On Democracy as the Most Dangerous Idea in Human History, see  https://progressivechristianity.org/resource/the-most-dangerous-idea-in-human-history/.