America at 250: Four Promises and One Test of Honesty

Fifty-six men gathered in Philadelphia on 4 July 1776 to sign a document declaring 13 British colonies “free and independent States”. Few political acts have altered the course of history more profoundly. The Declaration of Independence articulated an audacious proposition — that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed” and that liberty is an inherent human right rather than a concession granted by kings.

Those principles travelled far beyond North America. They influenced constitutional movements in Europe, inspired independence struggles across Latin America, fuelled anti-colonial nationalism in Asia and Africa, and helped shape the vocabulary of modern democracy. Although representative government existed before the United States, no large republic had previously attempted to sustain it on such a scale.

Anniversaries demand judgement as much as celebrations. America’s place in history must be measured by how far it has honoured the ideals it proclaimed. Over two and a half centuries, the US has effectively asked the world to believe in four promises:

1.    Democracy is superior to monarchy and to dictatorship

2.    Individual liberty flourishes best under a constitutional government

3.    Economic freedom creates greater prosperity than state control does, and

4.    Post-Second World War, American power would uphold a rules-based international order rather than one governed by brute force.

Each promise has reshaped the modern world, and each has also been tested by history.

Democracy: A republic that survived its own contradictions

No modern constitutional democracy has endured longer under a single written constitution than the US. Since 1789, it has survived a civil war, an economic depression, world wars, political assassinations, the upheavals of the Civil Rights Movement, Watergate, the trauma of 11 September, and the bitter polarisation culminating in the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Governments have changed, parties have risen and fallen, and society has transformed beyond recognition. The constitutional framework, however, has remained intact. Such institutional resilience is America’s greatest democratic achievement.

This longevity does not necessarily imply perfection. The republic that proclaimed equality tolerated slavery for nearly a century after Independence. Native American communities paid the price of westward expansion. Women secured the vote only in 1920, even as African Americans continued to face systemic discrimination long after slavery had been abolished. These milestones demonstrate that American democracy has advanced through correction. Unlike many authoritarian systems that suppress their failures, the US has repeatedly been forced to confront its own contradictions through public debate, legislation and judicial review.

Today’s arguments centre on a range of issues — money in politics, immigration, identity, judicial activism, election integrity, the influence of social media and declining trust in institutions. While such disputes are often cited as evidence of democratic decline, they also reflect a constitutional system’s capacity to accommodate intense disagreement without abandoning electoral politics.

A democracy will witness conflict; peaceful resolutions within constitutional rules test its foundations. The American ‘experiment’ remains remarkably resilient amid scrutiny from both friends and adversaries.

Liberty: America’s most enduring intellectual export

If democracy formed the institutional foundation of the American republic, liberty became its moral language. The Founding Fathers embraced a revolutionary idea for its time: a government formed after a colonial power’s departure may not secure freedom if it cannot protect the freedoms citizens already possess. This philosophy shaped the Bill of Rights, guaranteeing freedom of speech, religion and the press, protection against arbitrary arrest, due process of law and other civil liberties that have since become familiar features of democratic constitutions across the world.

America’s conception of individual rights became its most crucial intellectual export. Even governments that opposed Washington’s foreign policy often adopted constitutional protections inspired by the American example.

The tension has always centred on defining the limits of liberty. Wars have expanded executive power. National security has repeatedly clashed with privacy. The digital age has complicated questions of free speech in ways unimaginable in the eighteenth century. The right to bear arms, protected by the Second Amendment, continues to provoke fierce disagreement between those who regard it as a constitutional safeguard and those who see it as incompatible with public safety.

These debates illustrate how seriously Americans continue to take the idea of being a free people. The tug-of-war between individual freedom and collective responsibility may have alternating winners as citizens argue over where its boundaries should lie.

Is capitalism prosperity through markets or something more complicated?

Capitalism is strongly linked to the US, with symbols like Wall Street and Silicon Valley shaping America's image as a talent-driven land. However, modern America isn't the pure free-market economy envisioned by thinkers like Adam Smith, which champions property rights, voluntary exchange, open competition, and limited government. Instead, it mixes these ideals with regulation, central banking, industrial policy, subsidies, lobbying, defence contracts, and state intervention for' too big to fail' institutions.

Criticisms of capitalism often target cronyism, not markets. Income inequality has grown, with rising executive pay and wealth concentration, driven by technology creating massive fortunes. But inequality isn't unique to market economies; socialist systems historically favoured elites and caused scarcity.

India's post-Independence controls slowed growth and worsened poverty, whereas the 1991–2004 liberalisation boosted affluence and improved living standards, making the poor seem worse off by contrast.

Research shows free-market economies achieve higher growth, income convergence, and better standards than central planning, demonstrating that economic freedom is the superior system, as shown in global comparisons including the US and Cold War context.

American leadership: The burden of power

Since 1945, the US has claimed not merely to defend its own interests but to uphold an international order governed by rules rather than raw power. For much of the post-war era, that claim carried considerable weight. The Marshall Plan helped to rebuild Western Europe. Japan and South Korea prospered under an American security umbrella. International trade expanded through institutions in which Washington played a central role. The US Navy secured the world’s principal sea lanes, while the dollar became the foundation of the global financial system. The period came to be described, not without justification, as Pax Americana.

Yet every international order generates resentment alongside stability. American military interventions in Vietnam, Panama, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya stemmed from different strategic calculations. Still, together they fostered the perception that Washington often claimed for itself a freedom of action it was reluctant to concede to others. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, riding on the hoax call of ‘weapons of mass destruction’, proved especially damaging to America’s moral authority.

During Donald Trump’s second presidency, this contradiction became explicit. Unlike his predecessors, Trump did not care two hoots about diplomacy. Getting frustrated with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and venting the exasperation on all European heads of state was crass. His highly public disagreement with Denmark and other European Union member-states over Greenland was in-your-face. Trump’s Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela was brazen.

Militarily, technologically and financially, the US remains unmatched. What changed was the international perception. Even close allies began to ask whether Washington still regarded itself as the guardian of a rules-based order or merely its principal beneficiary. That distinction may prove decisive in the decades ahead. A great power can compel compliance through strength. It retains leadership only with predictable conduct, which does not entail turning against its own allies one fine morning.

The United Nations and a changing world order

The debate naturally extends to the institutions America helped create. The United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank all emerged from the post-war order largely shaped by Washington. Yet nowhere is the paradox more apparent than at the United Nations itself. The organisation depends heavily on American financial support, operates on American territory and cannot function effectively without sustained American engagement. At the same time, successive US administrations have not hesitated to bypass it whenever they concluded that national interests demanded unilateral action.

The deeper problem, however, is institutional rather than American. The Security Council still reflects the geopolitical settlement of 1945 rather than the strategic realities of the twenty-first century. Britain and France retain permanent seats, while India — the world’s most populous nation, a leading economy and a responsible nuclear power — remains outside the Council’s permanent membership. Japan, Germany, Brazil and Africa are similarly underrepresented. An institution that claims universal legitimacy cannot indefinitely rest on an outdated distribution of power.

India and America: From mutual suspicion to strategic partnership

Few bilateral relationships better illustrate the shifting balance of global politics than that between India and the US. At Independence, the two countries appeared natural partners. Both were constitutional democracies. Both inherited British legal traditions, but the Cold War drove them apart. American military support for Pakistan and India’s growing proximity to the Soviet Union produced decades of mutual distrust.

Economic liberalisation in 1991 altered that trajectory. As India embraced global markets, ideological differences gradually gave way to shared strategic interests. The decisive political shift came under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who turned US sanctions for Pokhran II into the famous Jaswant Singh-Strobe Talbott dialogue. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh transformed that aspiration into policy through the landmark Civil Nuclear Agreement, with President George Bush Jr effectively acknowledging India’s responsible nuclear status despite India’s position outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has since expanded the partnership into defence manufacturing, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, maritime security, critical minerals and resilient supply chains. While the ties of Nehru and Indira Gandhi with successive US presidents were strained, Modi struck a rapport with Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump alike.

Pakistan testing the US’s tolerance for religious belligerence and terrorism might have expedited the Indo-American proximity. As the Islamic state also reduced to being a basket case, it has little left to offer to the Western hemisphere as a military peripheral cordon that it used to be as a member of the Cold War vintage SEATO and CENTO. ‘Failed Marshal’ Asim Munir’s wet dream of mediating in West Asia does not count.

India today works closely with the US without becoming a formal ally, maintains defence ties with Russia, strengthens partnerships with Europe and Japan, and expands engagement across the Middle East. Diplomatic flexibility has become one of New Delhi’s principal strategic assets in an increasingly multipolar world.

The republic that still shapes the argument

As the US marks 250 years of independence, it is neither a perfect republic nor a mere empire. Few nations have had such influence, but American ideals and contradictions remain evident. The key challenge for the US at 250 is credibility, as double standards undermine virtues that make it formidable. History shows empires fade, but not all civilisations do. Whether America fits the civilisational tradition is being tested in politics, courts, universities, markets, diplomacy, and on battlefields. This ongoing debate is America’s outstanding trait. Unlike nations that inherit history, the US argues with its own past, not discouraging the world from indulging in the debate either.