I responded via email to Professor Eliot Cohen’s Atlantic article “The Strategy Than Can Defeat Putin.” Cohen is Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Strategic International Studies. He replied “I think we are in agreement.”
What America is really about now pertains to the validity of U.S. leadership along the lines you've detailed; and pertains to…how the American Idea should be understood now, in this first half of this century.
There is validity to the often-dismissed notion of American Exceptionalism, which is vested in the superiority of democracy vis-à-autocracy that is at the root of the "rules-based international order" which is misrepresented by Putinism—and China!—as a U.S. hegemony.
Both China and Putinism posture the U.S. as hegemon because the dollar is the currency of choice in the global economy, when actually the dollar is so widely invested in other nations' economies that it has gained its anchoring of a stable global economic order which it didn't alone engineer. It's like NATO: NATO isn't expansionist; it was invited eastward. Nations sought U.S. investment so widely after WW-II that the dollar became humanity's monetary currency (distinct from the currency of ideas that cohere the principle-based international order, itself based on values of humanity: human rights, humanistic thinking, humanitarian care).
The breathtaking international response to Putin's invasion not only expresses an efficacy of collaborative global political leadership which the G-20 have instituted. It expresses a conception of humanity—a conception of values—which engineered the global collaborative formation of the United Nations, the formation of WTO, etc.
Fiona Hill noted this week, in her extended conversation with Ezra Klein [at the NYTimes], that an avowal of values my Zelensky favoring the West has rallied such strong response, not just representation of horror and Zelensky's resolve.
Americans need to better understand how the values that are inspiring the world are reflected by the values that comprise the humanitarian and democratic humanity of America—America: the first global nation, so defined by its immigrant constitution, which is the world's most exemplary cross-section of humanity.
America is not simply advancing a nationalism through its economic and political leadership. It's expressing a globality that is composed of the peoples whose nations have secured their futures in democratic hopes and engagements.
If Americans better appreciate how America is humanity's greatest instance of Itself—of humanity striving to flourish—in other words: that America is not a national humanity, but a humanity of the world seeking to spread genuine democratic government and fair markets—then Americans might better appreciate (now comes my partisan bias) why Biden has earned a stronger Democratic Congressional majority this coming November [election], because it's no understatement now to say that humanity, in the demographic sense of Our whole globality, depends on the humanity, in the profoundly ethical sense, that must orient the upcoming long road beyond Putinism (and beyond “socialism with Chinese characteristics").
