Recently there was a piece by William Pfaff in the New York Review of Books. It starts off by pointing out that deeply rooted in American political culture is the idea that the United States is not a country like other countries, but rather has a unique (or nearly unique) world historical moral mission, and then makes a more-or-less standard lefty case that this idea has been and continues to be the source of a great deal of misguided and evil U.S. policy.