Obama knew that he had leaned hard on other countries to follow our lead, so he expressed some humility in his closing press conference when he was asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism. “I believe,” he said, “in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” It was a quote that would be used for the next eight years to cast Obama as less than sufficiently adamant in his belief in America’s primacy among nations.
