“The Harvest of Messianic Foreign Policy”

[B]oth the Wilson and Bush policies derive from a virulent strain of American “exceptionalism,” the idea that the United States is special among the nations of the world.

[T]he messianic zeal of some evangelical Christians to convert others began being misdirected to infuse official U.S. foreign policy beginning in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War at the turn of the last century. President William McKinley wanted to use armed force to convert Filipinos to “Christianity”—even though most of them were already Catholics. Today, the idea that Americans are the “chosen people” who need to use force to make others more like themselves has morphed into the more secularly appealing notion of spreading U.S.-style democracy around the Middle East and the world. Instead of “saving” foreign peoples with “fire and brimstone” religion, the U.S. government is now “saving” them with democracy. …

It is the interventionist U.S. foreign policy that has contributed to the rise of radical political Islam in the first place. … More:

Despite its idealistic and messianic Wilsonian rhetoric throughout the years, the U.S. government has routinely propped up despots in the Islamic world that were perceived as friendly to U.S. interests. The only dissent allowed by these local autocrats was in the mosques. Thus, radical Islamists gained public legitimacy in these countries as the only force opposing the corrupt U.S.-backed regimes. Thus, the United States now faces anti-U.S. radical Islamic movements around the world that spawn terrorists. In 1978, one such anti-U.S. movement got control of the levers of power in Iran and created a theocratic Islamic state. In the 1990s, another, the Taliban, got control of the Afghan government and harbored terrorists that successfully conducted the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history on September 11, 2001—both examples of the blowback from messianic U.S. foreign policy.

The United States has made a great error in conducting a messianic, albeit often hypocritical, campaign to convert the world to “democratic” government using an interventionist foreign policy. Instead, U.S. policy makers should spend more time defending liberty at home from al Qaeda and other real threats and becoming a peaceful refuge of human rights for the world to emulate—the kind of American exceptionalism that the founders originally intended.