Mitt Romney says so. Daniel Larison nails him:

There isn’t very much that Obama has actually done abroad in the last two and a half years that clashes with what Romney thinks the U.S. ought to be doing, which is why he has to exaggerate the few differences that exist and otherwise repeat nonsense about Obama’s non-existent apologies. … Later on, I realized that this rhetoric about apologies and other conservatives’ charges that Obama didn’t believe in American exceptionalism were never meant to refer to anything that Obama had actually done. Instead, they were opportunities for the people making these charges to wrap themselves in the mantle of American nationalism, define belief in American exceptionalism in such a way that it could only apply to people who agreed with them, and to impute anti-Americanism to anyone else. The entire exercise is clearly fraudulent, but it is also one that many Republicans find quite satisfying.

One of the great disappointments I’ve had with Obama is that on social issues, he governs like the liberal he is, but on economics and foreign policy, he governs like a George W. Bush Republican. If you ever doubted it, look at the Libya intervention.

American exceptionalism is so deep within our national psyche, and has been since the beginning, that it will never be eliminated. James Kurth was correct to say that the realist tradition in American foreign policy “is not only rarely in America, it is un-American.” (N.B., Kurth, a conservative, is by no means saying that’s a good thing; read his brilliant essay/speech on the role a secularized Protestantism has played in shaping American foreign policy.) If we believe that we, as Americans, have been especially blessed, and have a special responsibility among the nations to be a light, then I agree. But that too often expresses itself not as humility — as holding ourselves to a higher standard, and striving to live by it — but rather as arrogance: believing that we are a kind of chosen people, and that that status gives us the right and even the obligation to impose ourselves on the rest of the world, and to think of ourselves as doing them a favor.

Nationalism is not the same thing as patriotism. We conservatives often cannot tell the difference, and refuse to consider that there is a difference — which is why many Republicans find these repulsive exercises, e.g., Romney’s, so satisfying. When I was in Louisiana recently, I talked to some friends whose family members had served in the Iraq war, and I talked to some veterans of that conflict. I asked one what he thought of it today.

“A waste,” he said. And that was all he said. Another friend spoke in detail about the suffering a member of the family, a boy I grew up with, is enduring since his return. All the things he saw and did in the war. He can’t talk about it. I was reminded of this passage from Wendell Berry’s short story “Making It Home,” about the return to small-town Kentucky of a World War II veteran:

The fighting had been like work, only a lot of people got killed and a lot of things got destroyed. It was not work that made much of anything. You and your people intended to go your way, if you could. And you wanted to stop the other people from going their way, if you could. And whatever interfered you destroyed. You had a thing on your mind that you wanted, or wanted to get to, and anything at all that stood in your way, you had the right to destroy. If what was in the way were women and little children, you would not even know it, and it was all the same. When your power is in a big gun, you don’t have any small intentions. Whatever you want to hit, you want to make dust out of it. Farm buildings, houses, whole town — things that people had made well and cared for a long time — you made nothing of.

And I thought about the passage in “All Quiet on the Western Front,” in which the soldier-narrator is home from the hell of the front on leave, and encounters older men sitting in the cafe back home, talking about the heroic and patriotic deeds of their soldiers on the front. They have no idea what they’re talking about, and the cost the war is exacting from the young men of the town who are fighting it.

Thinking about what the Iraq War did to people I know, my instinct is to want to protect the boys I know from the demands of Empire. That, I believe, is patriotic. I am not a pacifist by any means. War is a necessary evil — but it is always an evil, even if it must be undertaken to defend against a greater evil. The kind of nationalism that Mitt Romney and the standard-grade Republican passes off as patriotism is a lie. The goodness of America does not lie in Empire and military conquest. It is our curse that both parties believe that American greatness requires it, and that indeed to fail to embrace this missionary militarism is to, in some sense, fail to take up one’s moral destiny as an American.

The charge that a politician who doesn’t embrace a maximalist foreign policy is in some sense ashamed of his country is a powerful one, and an ugly one. I used to believe it myself, though I cloaked my own motives from myself, veiled by a sense of high moralism. I was wrong. What I’m ashamed of today is that I helped make a morally honest and realistic debate about the Iraq War difficult by perpetuating the notion that to dissent from the war was unpatriotic. I won’t be fooled again. Nobody fooled me; i fooled myself, because I misunderstood what it meant to love America.

No politician who argues as Mitt Romney does has a claim on my vote, even if he does represent the supposedly conservative party. The longer I live, the more the truth of Alasdair MacIntyre’s observation manifests: “The contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals.”