Contingent or Enduring? The Question Europe Can't Afford to Get Wrong
What Tocqueville saw in America, what Ukraine is proving, and why Europe can no longer wait for the answer.
There is a phrase that gets invoked so often it has lost its edges. Politicians deploy it as a shield. Critics use it as an accusation. Commentators reach for it when they need a shorthand for American arrogance, or American greatness, depending on which side of the argument they are on. But almost nobody stops to ask what American exceptionalism actually meant when it was first articulated, and whether what we are witnessing today is its end, its transformation, or simply its latest test.
The answer matters. Not just for Americans, but for every European defense minister, every NATO planner, and every startup founder building dual-use technology in Warsaw or Kyiv or Berlin who has been quietly asking: can we still count on the United States?
The Original Idea
The term itself is often misattributed. Most people assume it is an American invention, a piece of national self-congratulation dressed up as political philosophy. In fact, the phrase was coined by Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who toured the United States in 1831 and came back with one of the most penetrating analyses of democratic society ever written. What he observed was not superiority but difference. America was exceptional not because it was better, but because it had come into being in a way no nation before it had, without feudalism, without an established church, without an aristocracy, and without the weight of centuries of dynastic conflict.
The conditions of the New World had produced a new kind of political animal: individualistic, egalitarian in aspiration if not always in practice, deeply suspicious of centralized authority, and animated by a peculiar combination of religious conviction and commercial energy. This was not a boast. It was an observation.
The ideological content came later. By the twentieth century, American exceptionalism had evolved into something more muscular: the belief that the United States was not merely different but chosen, by history, by providence, or simply by the logic of its own success, to lead the world toward liberal democracy, open markets, and the rule of law. Woodrow Wilson gave it a missionary quality. Franklin Roosevelt gave it institutional form, in the shape of the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, and eventually NATO. After 1945, it became the architecture of the entire international order.
At its best, this was genuinely idealistic. The Marshall Plan rebuilt European economies not because it was strategically convenient, though it was, but because American policymakers believed, with some sincerity, that prosperous democracies were less likely to go to war. The creation of the Bretton Woods system reflected a conviction that shared rules and institutions were preferable to the zero-sum mercantilism that had helped produce two world wars in thirty years. NATO was an alliance, not an empire, and that distinction mattered enormously to the countries that joined it.
This is the ideal that is now under interrogation.
What It Actually Delivered
It is worth being clear-eyed about the record, because the nostalgia that surrounds American exceptionalism is not entirely warranted.
The same country that built the postwar liberal order also overthrew democratically elected governments in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and elsewhere when they threatened American commercial or strategic interests. It fought a catastrophic war in Vietnam in the name of containing communism and left three million dead. It supported authoritarian regimes across Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia with the same enthusiasm it brought to defending democracy in Western Europe. The gap between the rhetoric and the reality was, at times, enormous.
And yet. The gap was also genuinely contested, domestically and internationally, in ways that mattered. American civil society, its free press, its universities, its courts, and eventually its voters pushed back against the worst excesses. The country that conducted the My Lai massacre also produced the journalists who exposed it. The country that supported Pinochet also had senators who held hearings about it. The institutions were imperfect, but they were real, and they created accountability, however delayed and incomplete.
This is the distinction that gets lost in both the hagiographic and the cynical accounts. American exceptionalism was never simply a description of what America did. It was also a set of commitments that created obligations, obligations that could be, and often were, invoked against American behaviour by Americans themselves. That internal corrective mechanism was part of what made the system, over the long run, more trustworthy than the alternatives.
The New Era and the Central Question
We are now, unambiguously, in a different moment. The signals are not subtle. The United States has, for the first time in the postwar era, openly questioned whether its treaty commitments to NATO allies are unconditional. Its administration has described the European Union, an organization built in part to anchor US strategic interests on the continent, as an adversary. It has paused military aid to Ukraine, the country most visibly fighting for the territorial sovereignty norms that the postwar order was designed to protect. It has imposed tariffs on allies and adversaries with equal indifference to the multilateral frameworks it helped create.
The question that serious analysts are now asking is not whether this represents a change. It obviously does. The question is whether it is institutional and enduring, a genuine realignment of American strategic culture, or whether it is contingent and personal, the product of one administration and one political movement that will recede when the political tide turns.
The honest answer is that we do not yet know, and anyone who claims certainty in either direction is selling something.
There are strong arguments for the contingent interpretation. The machinery of the American state, the career diplomatic corps, the military officer class, the intelligence community, the network of think tanks and universities that produce foreign policy professionals, remains largely committed to alliance relationships and multilateral institutions. When this administration leaves office, those people will still be there. Allies will still be there. The treaties will still exist.
But there are equally strong arguments for the structural interpretation. The political coalition that produced the current moment did not emerge from nowhere. It reflects genuine disillusionment among a large portion of the American electorate with the costs and benefits of global leadership, costs that have been concentrated in specific communities and regions, benefits that have been diffuse and often invisible. That disillusionment did not begin in 2016 and will not end whenever the current administration ends. Pat Buchanan was making versions of this argument in 1992. The isolationist tradition in American politics is as old as the republic itself.
What may have changed is not the existence of that tradition but its political viability. The institutions and cultural norms that previously contained it, bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, the prestige of the foreign policy establishment, the memory of what American disengagement produced in the 1930s, have weakened. The restraining mechanisms are less powerful than they were.
What Europe Should Actually Conclude
For European policymakers and investors, the operationally relevant question is not whether American exceptionalism is philosophically intact. It is whether American reliability, as a security guarantor, as a technology partner, as a market, can be assumed in the way it was assumed for the past seventy years.
The answer is clearly no, and the most clear-eyed European governments have already acted on that conclusion. German defense spending, long the symbol of European free-riding, is now above two percent of GDP and rising. France has been making the argument for European strategic autonomy for decades and is now finding an audience it never had before. The EU defence industrial initiatives that were marginal policy discussions three years ago are now funded programmes with real procurement attached.
This is not anti-Americanism. It is risk management. And it is, paradoxically, more consistent with the original vision of American exceptionalism, a world of self-governing democracies capable of defending their own interests, than the dependency relationship that the postwar order eventually produced.
For investors deploying into European defense tech, this is not an abstract question. The valuation of every dual-use startup, every autonomy platform, every counter-drone company in the portfolio carries an embedded assumption about US reliability. If that assumption is wrong, even partially, even temporarily, the addressable market for European sovereign defence capability is not a niche. It is the primary market.
America’s exceptionalism was a founding story, written in optimism before the hardest tests came. Whether it will endure is no longer obvious. Perhaps the most honest answer to what makes the West exceptional is not found in Washington or Brussels at all. It is found in Ukraine, where people are dying for the right to choose which world they belong to. If that is not worth defending, then the idea was never as exceptional as we claimed. If it is, then the question of who defends it and who hesitates may be the most clarifying test the concept has ever faced.