SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: You can have American values. Or you can have American exceptionalism.

https://x.com/nxt888/status/2090096350910370213

I want to address what "American values" means when applied to this situation.

American values, in the founding documents: all men are created equal, with unalienable rights, and governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Applied universally, this means Iranian people have the same unalienable rights as American people. It means the Iranian government's legitimacy question is for Iranians to resolve. It means no external power has the right to determine, through sanctions and military threats and covert operations, what government Iran gets to have.

This is not an anti-American argument.

It is the American argument, taken seriously.

The people who wrote those words were arguing against exactly the kind of arrangement you're describing: a larger power deciding, on the basis of its own interests and values, what smaller countries are permitted to do.

They called that arrangement tyranny.

They called the resistance to it liberty.

The values you're invoking to defend American policy toward Iran are the same values that, applied consistently, condemn it.

You can have American values.

Or you can have American exceptionalism.

They are not the same thing.

And the history of American foreign policy is largely the history of choosing the second while invoking the first.