Obama, Drone Warfare, and American Exceptionalism

When considering the Presidency of Barack Obama, much ado is made about his reliance on drone warfare and the resultant ethical and moral implications. Presidents have historically become tainted with foreign military campaigns, painted as overtly cunning and cruel in the eyes of the American and wider global populace, but it can be easily argued these individual political juggernauts are at the mercy of the American moral compass as opposed to personal failings in ethics. 

The American Dream. The white porch. The US flag waving overhead as the white nuclear family heads out towards their ruby-red car. Strutting over manicured emerald-green grass and past the picket fence, the ‘self-made’ father calmly waves at his neighbours as he enters the driving seat, heading off for a weekend of sun-blasted boating. Such idealism has been fundamental to US history, working to induce the mass emigration that has defined America’s ethnic makeup so diversely – the manifestation of destiny. These underpinnings of American culture, as an exceptionalist phenomenon, have cemented nationalistic sentiments in the minds of US citizens, who have projected such viewpoints globally. The people of the US leapt into the land of opportunity, a place where anyone can be anything with enough effort and guts. Admirable principles that are so alluring they enable people to subscribe to them so deeply that they constitute alterations in self-perception – that the American people are truly greater than those of other nations, under other ideals. Why would they want to be anything other than American? 

US global hegemony has been fuelled by liberal interventionism and Wilsonianism stemming from the psyche of the American citizen, who expects their government and Congressional representatives to ooze the same exceptionalistic sentiment, and therefore expectant in their desire to teach, spread, or impose the values of the States internationally. 

The extent to which individual US presidents and their cabinets subscribed to The American Dream varies, but all have to answer to the psychological weight of such a culturally ingrained concept and the subsequent superiority complex placed on the direction of US politics. Hence, presidents need to drag the international community in the American direction: towards freedom-infested democratisation, capitalism and rigid constitutionalism. The USA has managed to possess a culture defined by its history, whilst simultaneously defining it, observable through consideration of America’s self-defined role in the post-war political climate. 

The dependency of the Allied war effort on the military and economic power of the United States during WW2 provided the necessary geopolitical context for the Western world to unite behind American leadership. This juxtaposed the rise of Communism in the Eastern hemisphere, Africa and Latin America, leading to the adoption of the Truman Doctrine in which the Cold War was declared, with the two powers fighting for global ideological supremacy. The continual interventionist measures of differing administrations across the Cold War reinforced the internal precedent of US domination through perpetual landings on foreign soil, fighting foreign wars, and opposing foreign principles. From Korea to Vietnam, Cuba to Panama, Nicaragua to Iran, all served to fuel American exceptionalist ideals – that these interventions, wars, skirmishes, covert and overt, were declared because of the belief it is worth dying, or sending others to die, to perpetuate the unique US supremacy. After all, it is an entrenched cultural belief that it is worth dying for the stars and stripes of the US flag.

Withdrawing from a retrospective lens to a more contemporary context, American presidents have still failed to shake the unwavering widespread jingoism. The Cold War has concluded, with US exceptionalism only reinforced by American principles standing strong in an ideological graveyard. It is no wonder, then, that interventionism has itself not wavered, with potent involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq shadowing over modern American history. Over time, the ethics of America’s global affairs have become increasingly foggy, with the US Army utilising world-leading military technology to fundamentally change warfare - specifically, the rise of drone warfare. 

The Presidency of Barack Obama is tied so closely with ‘change’, ‘hope’ –  a movement ‘forward’. The belligerent nationalistic nature of the US, unsurprisingly, perceived the prospect of pushing their liberal ideals in sand-swept scapes (without as many casualties) as part of this neo-American progressive vision. After all, drones allow war to be waged without threat to oneself, in “the most distant and unforgiving places on earth” (as Obama described, in a 2013 speech at the National Defence University). Obama’s administration had no choice: they had to feed American exceptionalism without sacrificing lives, with the means to do so regardless of topographical challenges. Principally, morality appears at the heart of this decision. Technology can make up for human error, allowing the protection of civilians in hostile war zones as well as deployed American forces, pushing the ascendancy of US values in all corners of the world, to all nations of the world, without as much grief back home. This morality must be palpable for civilians who have lost family and friends to faceless drones, piloted in a faraway land by an unfeeling, desensitised agitant (such as the family and friends of the 23 civilian Afghan nationals killed in Daykundi, 2010, following a string of illogical insistence on behalf of drone pilots). 

I am not scathing Obama’s utilisation of drones, those who pilot them, or the technology itself. In fact, the framing of US ideological and international history is intended to serve as a quasi-defence of the Obama administration’s rhetoric and approach towards such modern technology. The American Dream is still as potent in US politics as it has always been. Presidents and their role as commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces are under the influence of the same psychological weight, compounded by the electorate they are answerable to being under similar influence. Hence, the ethics of the individual presidents have become subservient to national beliefs (in the rare case such beliefs juxtapose), leading to the logical progression of technology used within warfare with identical aims to wars waged over the past 100 years: Americanising the world. 

Drone warfare is, within itself, a deeply complex subject which ought to consider ethical, moral, racial, psychological and legal debate (amongst other key considerations), and to scratch the complexity of such a ground-breaking phenomenon within an approximately 1,000-word article falls into the remit of impossibility. Instead, this article intends to frame such discussions within the context of wider ideological flaws that have persisted throughout US history, explaining the consistency of the presidential approach to international relations. Wider discussion about modern warfare and America’s role in a shifting geopolitical world, therefore, should be less critical of retrospectively reprehensible interventionism and more fixated on the perpetually looming façade of American exceptionalism that has informed it.