Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recently completed 11-day journey through Africa offered further proof that, with the Obama administration, the age of “American exceptionalism,” as we have known it, is over.
In the past, American policymakers too often lectured, hectored African nations and peoples. Africans, by Americans, were condescendingly addressed, as if they were errant children.
Clinton, in contrast, approached Africans as equals. In Nigeria, she acknowledged that the American electoral system is subject to the same sorts of corruption, nepotism, and cronyism that can afflict African nations. And in Cape Verde and South Africa she stated that the US could learn from the African example.
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