Think of the quarterback of a football team. More celebrated than his teammates, he leads by his own example of excellence in the sport and is rewarded with the willing followership of his teammates. They follow, but they are woven with him into the fabric of the team. He cannot win without them, and he must constantly earn their help through admiration and respect, rather than awe and fear. When he succeeds, he collects more garlands (admiration, money, authority) than they do. He leads by example, but it’s the team that wins the game, not the quarterback. And he grows stronger, through the collective success of others.

The United States is still the "quarterback" of the global community–or, in the words of Bill Clinton, the "indispensable nation"–and it is in the American interest to remain in that position. After all, an abdication of that responsibility would most likely result in China’s ascension to an even a more dominant place position in the world, the position of one of the world’s dominant powers, and even the most dovish progressive should not want a world order dominated by such a hegemonic, authoritarian nation (to take one prominent competitor).

Exemplarism’s roots in exceptionalism mean that the United States must recognize its special role in the world. We cannot always act through international institutions like the United Nations. But, when "the eyes of all people are upon us," and us alone, we must be able to convince other nations to join us in the "city upon a hill." Unlike neoconservatism, realism, or liberalism, exemplarism embraces morality, power, and prestige. Exemplarism perceives synergies between the three values and collective strength–like three pillars under a stone tablet–in their combination.

Above all, exemplarism grasps the enormous latent authority in America’s almost congenital idealism. Perhaps it is best explained as the hard power of imagination. Idealism allows the United States to shake off the blinkers of self-interest and discover new horizons. Through idealism, we expand our understanding of the new and, in so doing, create possibilities. Whether it be through creative new multilateral institutions, innovative diplomacy, improved human rights regimes, sophisticated trade and economic systems, partnerships for environmental ameliorations, or new energy schemes, the new world we envision, and create, is–in theory and in practice–better for us and our neighbors. Idealism, to the United States, is self-interested–because it speaks to, and supports, our best national self and because it is built on an unshakable confidence that America’s democratic values–in theory, if not always in practice–are universal aspirations.

Exemplarism has deep roots in the neglected, though fertile, soil of America’s past. When the United States plowed years of effort and billions of dollars into building constitutional democracies in Japan and Germany in the wake of World War II, we generally avoided the charge of imperialism and unwarranted intrusion. This was partly attributable to the plain belligerence of these two countries toward the Allied powers. But we also succeeded because we were seen not as occupiers per se, but rather as leaders bringing the conquered nations back to the fold of the world community. In Japan, General Douglas MacArthur could have completely suffocated local desires with a constitution cut from American cloth. Instead, the 1948 Japanese constitution carefully incorporated Japanese custom, while evading the classism and centralization of the prior Meiji Constitution. The nation-building that followed earned the support of the Japanese and the watching world, and helped confer moral credibility on the United States in the cold war that would follow with the ussr.

A similar story can be told about Germany. That Germany today is a modern liberal democracy can be attributed largely to the careful stewardship of the postwar occupation and de-Nazification program. As a result, during the Cold War West Germans sought to be more liberal and democratic, more like the United States, rather than either a communist or authoritarian country. Germany was part and parcel of the Marshall Plan, which invested billions in rebuilding societies that ultimately would share (if not surpass) most American values; that is exemplarism par excellence.

As Truman once told Henry Kissinger, in response to a question about what he wanted to be remembered for, "We completely defeated our enemies and made them surrender. And then we helped them to recover, to become democratic, and to rejoin the community of nations. Only America could have done that." The United States used its moment of triumph not to shame or annihilate its vanquished enemies, but to rebuild them, to show the world the moral quality of its leadership and the rightness of its military might. America’s postwar behavior quickly redounded in its favor–had we treated Japan as a conquered colony, it is unlikely that we would have received such support from the United Nations during the Korean War. Had we followed Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s advice and exacted retribution on Germany by returning it to a pre-industrial pastoral life, we almost certainly would not have been able to build as strong a Western European alliance as we did.

Then there is the Peace Corps. President John F. Kennedy announced an executive order forming the Peace Corps on March 1, 1961, and his remarks while doing so placed a striking emphasis on America’s leadership of the world–rather than the self-indulgent, feel-good impulse of the archetypal "bleeding-heart liberal." As Kennedy described them, Peace Corps volunteers were "sharing in [a] great common task," creating the building blocks of societies, themselves "the foundation of freedom and a condition of peace." But the work was hard. The volunteers would have no salary, and would live simply, on "allowances sufficient only to maintain health and meet basic needs." In the almost 50 years since its founding, the Peace Corps has served as a powerful rebuttal to those who accuse the country of neo-imperialist tendencies, while making valuable contributions to the democratic development of Third-World countries.

Looking forward, exemplarism presents a roadmap for many of our knottiest foreign policy problems. Regarding the torture of terrorist suspects, an exemplarist would differ slightly, but significantly, from Senator John McCain, who has argued pragmatically that "mistreatment of enemy prisoners endangers our own troops who might someday be held captive" and that negative public opinion will counterbalance any positive effect from the information gained. While both propositions are true, the exemplarist would subsume both in a broader claim: if we refuse torture from a position of strength, other nations will follow our moral leadership and, ultimately, serve our interests.

Or take the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. The Bush Administration has refrained from committing any real U.S. resources to the country, and yet this is precisely the sort of crisis that would benefit from U.S. action. From a moral perspective alone, we have ample grounds for deploying more assets and troops. But exemplarism would advise action on further strategic grounds. By fighting harder for a resolution in Darfur, by deploying a multilateral force, by investing more resources in infrastructure, and by striving to invest all the sectarian forces in a single political process, the United States could prove its commitment to leading a less-cruel world. As it did in the past, the world would most likely reward us with loyalty in other emerging trouble spots.

Would exemplarism have allowed the United States to lead an effort to topple Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq? The answer is an emphatic yes–though on a different set of prerequisites. Exemplarism never would have imposed a "global test" for military action, because that would undermine exemplarism itself; in order to lead, the United States must maintain the ability to defend its relative power position unilaterally. But exemplarism would have required American policymakers to weigh more seriously unilateralism’s impact on our standing in the global community–not because we wanted to be popular, but because decreased international prestige would have limited our ability to advance our interests in Iraq and the Middle East–as, in the end, it has.

Already, elements of an exemplarist worldview are starting to bubble to the surface. Since the late 1980s, the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye has convincingly argued for a new emphasis on America’s "soft power": our ability to persuade and attract other nations through our culture and political ideals. And last year Bob Boorstin and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress released a report titled "Integrated Power," which called for marrying both hard and soft power in a new progressive foreign policy and "merging the many and varied powers of the United States–military, economic, political, cultural, and diplomatic, among others"–to put the United States in "the strongest position to address threats, prevent conflicts, and recapture its moral leadership." While both of these theories provide useful and in some cases profound insights into how the United States can better promote its self-interest, neither provides a vision for how recapturing America’s unique role as a force for moral justice in the world can greatly expand our nation’s power and prestige.

In the end, vulgar exceptionalism simply fails to understand that the path to strength lies in confidence and generosity rather than paranoia and hostility. And it is a connection that has been understood for centuries. The complementary relationship of strength and admiration was explained by the Stoic Roman poet Seneca, who urged the brutal Emperor Nero to practice clemency toward his subjects:

[I]t is a mistake to suppose that the king can be safe in a state where nothing is safe from the king: he can only purchase a life without anxiety for himself by guaranteeing the same for his subjects. He need not pile up lofty citadels, escarp steep hills, cut away the sides of mountains, and fence himself about with many lines of walls and towers: clemency will render a king sage even upon an open plain. The one fortification which cannot be stormed is the love of his countrymen.

We need not be the world’s emperor of fear, embattled, like Nero, behind citadels and towers. We are a more confident nation than that. The America of exemplarism is the America of imagination, of moral vision, and of courage. It is a nation that can grow stronger by the ineluctable attractions of its own unique capabilities and goodwill–by the charisma of its own great character.