On 19 November 1919, the United States Senate perpetrated a breach of trust that would set the template for a century of American statecraft. It rendered the presidential diplomatic signature unreliable in the eyes of the world, and that ignominious precedent echoes to this day. Woodrow Wilson had travelled to Paris to champion the League of Nations and secure its incorporation into the Treaty of Versailles, staking America’s moral authority as the architect of a new international order in which law, not force, would restrain power. But he came home to a Senate that would not ratify what he had signed. America had authored the architecture of collective security and then declined to uphold it.
The ghost of Versailles was not an aberration but the inauguration of a two-faced US foreign policy. The refusal to join the League set a precedent that would recur with metronomic regularity: the United States as the indispensable drafter of international order, and the first defector from it. Historians of American diplomacy, including George F. Kennan and Henry Kissinger, have treated the Senate’s rejection as a pivotal turning point in American foreign policy. Its greatest consequence, however, was not what it did in 1919, but what it licensed over the century that followed — an incorrigible habit of writing rules while reserving Washington’s own exemption.
The United States didn’t replay Wilson’s mistake after 1945. By joining the United Nations, helping design the Bretton Woods system and contributing to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the US projected a commitment to a rule-based order. To the baby-boomer generation, it seemed America’s penance. It was, in fact, the construction of a far subtler instrument: an international order supple enough to bind the weak, yet porous enough to let the powerful slip through it whenever realpolitik demanded.
The pattern is now so pervasive that it reads less like a series of policy choices and more like a national character trait. Washington helped negotiate the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Then it refused to ratify it, later sanctioning the court’s own prosecutors for investigating alleged crimes by American personnel in Afghanistan. The Clinton administration endorsed the humanitarian objective of eliminating anti-personnel landmines yet declined to join the 1997 Ottawa Treaty banning them. Washington was one of the principal negotiators of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 only to leave it unratified. Even the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union — the cornerstone of strategic stability for three decades — was unilaterally abandoned in 2002. It negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership for seven years across three administrations, then unceremoniously abandoned it in the first week of Donald Trump’s first presidency, betraying eleven partner nations by deserting an agreement Washington had spent years championing and negotiating.
None of this required an external shock. No adversary forced America’s hand. Every withdrawal was self-inflicted, and every justification ultimately reduced to the same proposition — the rules apply until they inconvenience us.
Political psychology explains why this behaviour persists despite its catastrophic costs abroad. In-group exceptionalism, the conviction that one’s own nation is subject to a different moral calculus than the nations it judges, produces what psychologists call motivated reasoning. Its consequence is that Washington no longer considers breaches of trust and treaty obligations hypocritical, because it has already reclassified the act as an exception rather than a violation. Iran enriching uranium beyond a cap is a provocation. America walking away from the very agreement that imposed the cap is prudence. The underlying cognitive pattern corresponds to what social psychologists document in individuals: a self-serving asymmetry in moral judgement expressed by the fundamental attribution error, in which identical behaviour is evaluated differently depending on who commits it. Scaled up from the individual to the nation, this cognitive asymmetry becomes the creed of American exceptionalism.
Scholars of international relations, from Thomas Schelling to Keren Yarhi-Milo, have long debated whether states that repeatedly break their promises eventually lose the persuasive force of future commitments. They must compensate with hard power by embroiling themselves in wars, military interventions, and coercive tactics to regain the trust they have squandered. America has become the living proof of the grim maxim attributed to Henry Kissinger: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”
History is not sympathetic to powers that treat law as an instrument to be honoured only when convenient. In the Melian Dialogue, Thucydides records the Athenians demanding the submission of the neutral island of Melos, declaring that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” — a doctrine that culminated in the massacre of Melians and contributed to the strategic isolation of Athens, teaching every remaining neutral city that Athenian promises were contingent on Athenian convenience. Rome’s later emperors governed through auctoritas married to fides — authority braided with credibility. Among the many causes of its slow unravelling was the growing realisation among frontier allies and client kingdoms that Roman guarantees no longer commanded confidence. As trust faded, so too did troops, tribute, and loyalty, until the empire rotted from within.
Communism supplies the ideological mirror to this argument. The Bolshevik promise was radical in its clarity: the abolition of class, the withering of the state, power to the proletariat. Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav dissident and former Communist insider, wrote of the emergence of a “new class” — a party bureaucracy that inherited every privilege of the bourgeoisie it had overthrown. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the workers in whose name the revolution had been fought were, by socioeconomic statistics, worse off than the proletariat of the capitalist states the revolution had promised to bury. The nomenklatura drove Western cars, holidayed on the Black Sea dachas, preserved the very class hierarchy they claimed to have abolished, and left ordinary Soviet citizens queuing for bread in a state that had promised to end scarcity itself. The Soviet Union did not collapse because the state reneged on its promises. It disintegrated because no one believed them anymore.
The structural failure is now visible in Washington. A nation that struggles to sustain belief in its own founding covenant inevitably finds it harder to persuade the world to believe its external promises. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed equality and liberty as universal principles; today, widening political polarisation, exclusionary nationalism, and deepening economic inequality have left many Americans questioning whether those promises are manifested in practice. Widening inequality and decades of stagnant median wages despite rising productivity testify to the consolidation of a new elite. Political theorist Sheldon Wolin described this condition as “inverted totalitarianism,” in which democratic forms endure while power becomes increasingly insulated from democratic control. As belief in the American Dream erodes at home, so too does faith in America’s word across the world.
Since the 1980s, the pattern has spanned both parties and every administration, making it structural rather than partisan. Reagan mined Nicaraguan harbours, rejected the International Court of Justice’s 1986 judgment against Washington and blocked enforcement at the UN Security Council. George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002 and invaded Iraq in 2003 without UN Security Council authorisation required under the UN Charter, which US administrations had spent fifty years invoking against others.
Obama expanded drone warfare into at least seven sovereign states, drawing repeated criticism from UN special rapporteurs over its compatibility with international humanitarian and human rights law. Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, the JCPOA, the INF Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, UNESCO, the UN Human Rights Council, and the World Health Organisation — a cascade of exits unmatched by any single administration in the postwar record. Biden rejoined some of these, then presided over near-unconditional arms transfers to Israel during a war that a recent UN Commission of Inquiry concluded involved the commission of genocide by Israeli authorities and security forces.
No episode better illustrates the mechanics of American unreliability than the fate of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Negotiated by six world powers and the European Union, verified by the IAEA and unanimously endorsed by the UN Security Council, the JCPOA closed off Iran’s plutonium pathway to a nuclear weapon and capped its uranium enrichment at 3.67 per cent. Arms-control specialists across the political spectrum regarded it as a rare, robust technical achievement. The IAEA verified Iran’s compliance. In May 2018, the United States withdrew anyway, reimposed sanctions unilaterally, and left the rest of the P5+1 to preserve a deal that could no longer function without access to the American financial system.
Freed from a verification regime it had honoured to the letter, Iran began enriching uranium to 60 per cent purity within a few years, stockpiling a quantity one short technical step from weapons-grade. The very outcome the JCPOA had been built to prevent became measurably more likely because the guarantor state broke the guarantee. By 2025, European parties to a deal Washington had abandoned seven years earlier were forced to trigger snapback sanctions themselves, performing the last rites of an architecture the United States had built, endorsed at the Security Council, and then unilaterally condemned to death. The Iranian negotiators and European diplomats who spent two years in Vienna already know what an American signature is worth today. Their verdict requires no translation.
Cabinet officials who once resigned on principle, as Cyrus Vance did over the failed Iran hostage rescue and George Shultz contemplated resignation during the Iran-Contra affair, have been replaced by a governing style that rewards the loudest affirmation of whatever President Trump declared that morning.
The defining posture of the current American cabinet is competitive deference, with aides and secretaries competing to outdo one another in public praise of a president whom The Washington Post’s Fact Checker documented as having made 30,573 false or misleading statements in his first term alone. A republic that once exported the idea of checks and balances now exports a cabinet table arranged, quite literally, around the performance of loyalty to one man’s version of events. Statesmanship cannot flourish where sycophancy is rewarded.
Joseph Nye warned, before he died in 2025, that the current administration was presiding over one of the steepest declines in American “soft power”. Pew’s 2026 Global Attitudes Survey and the Munich Security Report both confirmed growing apprehensions about American reliability among its allies and within NATO. This is not propaganda from Beijing or Moscow. As Nye insisted, soft power is a strategic asset, built over decades and squandered in months through betrayal. A damaged reputation cannot be restored by executive order.
The real change the world is witnessing is strategic rebalancing. Middle powers are hedging, Gulf states signingsecurity and technology agreements with China alongside American ones, European capitals openly discussing “strategic autonomy” as insurance against an ally whose commitments now carry a built-in shelf life: roughly one election cycle. This isn’t anti-Americanism. It is prudent risk management by states that have watched Washington abandon the ABM Treaty, the INF Treaty, the Paris Agreement, the JCPOA, and the Open Skies Treaty, and concluded that an American signature is a four-year lease, not a covenant.
The graveyards of empire are filled not merely with defeated armies, but with exhausted myths. Athens fell because every city watching Melos understood that Athenian justice meant unconditional obedience to Athenian power. Rome decayed when its allies began to calculate that Roman guarantees were no longer credible. The Soviet Union collapsed because the people had learned to hear every official promise as a confession of its opposite. America now stands at that same moral frontier. It can summon fleets, impose sanctions, arm clients, and lecture the world from podiums draped in international law while simultaneously violating it. The one thing beyond its command is belief. Once belief is lost, hegemony becomes theatre: louder, costlier, bloodier, and more desperate. The question is no longer whether the world trusts America. The question is how long America can endure a world that has learned not to.
-30-
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to [email protected]
