Reverting to Form: American Exceptionalism and International Human Rights

Abstract

America’s “war on terror” and its related policies on human rights have been subjects of intense global controversy since 9/11.¹ The conventional wisdom is that US policy changed radically after the attacks, significantly damaging international human rights. To many observers, these changes reflect a characteristic American exceptionalism, a pattern of arrogance, hypocrisy, and double standards that typifies US attitudes and behavior on human rights (see Ignatieff 2005a). A disturbingly broad range of examples — regularized torture, the unsigning of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the suspension of the Geneva Conventions, detention without review in Guantanamo, “preemption” — supports this view.