Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan offered a counterintuitive reaction to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s op-ed in The New York Times last week, saying that other countries are “sick of hearing Americans” calling themselves exceptional.
Buchanan, author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” argued that Putin echoed what Obama and many Americans had said with regards to the United States as the world’s exceptional superpower.
“From the hysterical reaction in this city [Washington, D.C.] to Putin’s op-ed piece, he put this one right down the smokestack,” Buchanan said on ’s broadcast of “The McLaughlin Group. “What he did is he keyed off what Obama said on exceptionalism and he countered it with an argument which people all over the world believe. They are sick of hearing Americans talk about ‘we are the indispensable nation,’ as Madeline Albright said. ‘We see further than ours, that’s why we can use force.’ ‘We are the sheriff of the world, we are first, we are leaders.’ He’s not only appealing to the people of the world, he is appealing to that half of the United States to whom Barack Obama himself was appealing. So, I think he hit home.”
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