Ever since John Winthrop declared from Southampton in 1630, “We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us,” there has been a moral and moralizing dimension to the way Americans view their role in the world. The American exceptionalism that was, for the future governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a Christian missionary pronouncement, would ebb and flow over the next almost four-hundred years down to the present. But it has never gone away.
