As the United States prepares to commemorate the 250th anniversary of its founding, Americans have an opportunity to revisit one of the nation’s enduring questions.
In 1852, Frederick Douglass asked whether a nation founded on liberty would extend that promise to all its people. In so doing, he criticized slavery and, importantly, challenged Americans to close the gap between the country’s ideals and its reality.
Nearly 175 years later, Douglass’s challenge remains central to the United States’ standing in the world.
US global influence has not come from military strength or economic power alone. It has also come from its credibility. That credibility has depended on whether its democratic principles are reflected in the actions of its government, its institutions, its civil society, and its citizens. The United States has not been perfect, but perfection isn’t its greatest strategic advantage. Rather, it is the US capacity for democratic renewal, the willingness to narrow the distance between its founding ideals and its national practice.
I know this not only as a former US diplomat but as a sixth-generation American and fourth-generation Texan whose family story began alongside the nation itself.
My paternal great-great-great-grandfather, Free Frank McWorter, was born into slavery in 1777, the first full year of America’s existence. The timing captures the nation’s original paradox. While the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all people were created equal, my ancestor entered the world enslaved. Yet over generations, his family’s journey would come to mirror the United States’ own democratic evolution.
In 1836, Free Frank purchased his freedom and that of sixteen family members before founding New Philadelphia, Illinois, the first town in the United States legally established by an African American. His grandson, Squire McWorter Jr., served in the US Colored Troops’ 38th Infantry Regiment. In 1865, that regiment was deployed to Texas to enforce General Order No. 3 and, therefore, emancipation. Americans today celebrate that historic moment on Juneteenth.
Back then, freedom was not simply declared. It was implemented through institutions, law, and citizens committed to making constitutional promises real. That distinction between a promise made and a promise kept is exactly the challenge that US foreign policy has been navigating ever since.
A promise—and a contradiction
When US President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Secretary of State William Seward immediately transmitted it to diplomatic missions around the world. It was as much an international document as a domestic one, designed to rally moral support against the Confederacy and signal to foreign audiences that the United States intended to bring its actions closer to the ideals proclaimed in 1776. While the proclamation’s immediate purpose was the emancipation of enslaved people, it also reshaped how the United States presented itself to the world. It was an instrument of national branding, a declaration of American values on the global stage that could, and would, influence its global strategic position.
Yet, American policymakers still had to persuade foreign audiences that the United States not only declared but thoroughly believed in the democratic principles it promoted.
That belief has been challenged throughout the past century and a half. For example, as the Cold War intensified and newly independent nations emerged across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the Soviet Union exploited the contradiction between US advocacy for freedom abroad and racial segregation at home. America’s democratic credibility had become a strategic asset; but when that credibility wavered, it became a strategic vulnerability.
Few regions revealed that vulnerability more clearly than Africa.
International audiences notice when the US lags behind
The Eisenhower administration’s answer to boosting the US image abroad was jazz. Beginning in 1956, the State Department deployed “jazz ambassadors”—including stars such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie—to newly independent countries where the contest for influence among nonaligned nations was especially intense.
Ghana became an early test case for whether newly independent nations, particularly ones in Africa, would view the United States as a genuine partner or simply another great power advancing its own interests.
In 1956, one year before Ghana gained independence, Armstrong traveled there to play before Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, whose Pan-Africanist thinking had been shaped in part by his engagement with W.E.B. Du Bois, the African American freedom struggle, and other Black intellectual traditions. It was a moment of genuine solidarity between two peoples whose freedom had been separately promised and incompletely delivered.
The jazz ambassadors, however, were under no illusions. They were being asked to make the case for democracy built on American values—while they lived under segregation. In 1957, Armstrong canceled a State Department tour in protest over the Little Rock crisis. He did not rejoin until he felt change occurred. His refusal was itself diplomacy, an insistence that the United States’ credibility abroad was inseparable from its conduct at home.
Washington imperfectly absorbed that lesson. The same year Armstrong toured the Congo, the United States backed efforts to remove Patrice Lumumba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s first prime minister, after he sought assistance from the Soviet Union to address a crisis his young government struggled to contain. A fear of communism overrode democratic principles. African audiences noticed. The gap between what America performed culturally and what it practiced politically would shape perceptions of the United States for decades.
The people’s power, then and now
The most effective US engagement abroad has never come from governments alone. It has come from people.
Just look to Douglass, whose abolitionist tours of Britain and Ireland helped shape international opinion against slavery before the US government took a formal position. Or the African American-led anti-apartheid movement, which compelled US policy on South Africa to eventually catch up with the American conscience. Or the worldwide response to the killing of George Floyd in 2020, which reminded that domestic struggles continue to shape how others judge US leadership.
The lesson is not that governments are unimportant. It is that US influence has often traveled through citizens, artists, educators, athletes, faith leaders, and activists whose actions reinforced, challenged, or expanded official policy. This broader democratic ecosystem remains one of the United States’ greatest strategic advantages.
What America 250 asks of us
As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, it must come to understand that democratic credibility is a strategic objective rather than simply an aspiration based on values. Policymakers should invest deliberately in educational exchanges, research partnerships, civic engagement, cultural diplomacy, and people-to-people relationships as they do in traditional instruments of statecraft. These investments project confidence not because they conceal the United States’ imperfections, but because they demonstrate the resilience of its democratic institutions and citizens.
Indeed, the United States isn’t perfect. That is clear from the stories of many American families, mine included. But the fact that my ancestors helped enforce emancipation, and generations later, I had the privilege of serving as a US diplomat abroad, reflects the United States’ continuing effort to bring democratic practice closer to its promise.
To this day, that is a worthy effort, for more reasons than one. The African continent shows why: There, it is clear that US influence depends on more than military power, aid budgets, or diplomatic statements. It depends on the credibility of its democracy, demonstrated through the actions of its institutions, its civil society, and its people.
Deneyse A. Kirkpatrick is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center and founder and chief executive officer of Kirkpatrick Global Strategies. She served for two decades as a US foreign service officer with assignments across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, and as the senior advisor to the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.
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