National Exceptionalism

If a great nation doesn't believe that the truth resides in it alone (in it alone, to the exclusion of all other nations), if it doesn't believe that it alone is capable and chosen to resurrect and save everyone through its own history, then it immediately ceases to be a great nation and is at once transformed merely into ethnographic material. A genuinely great nation can never be content to play a secondary role in human history, not even a primary role; it must necessarily and exclusively be first. A nation which loses this faith can no longer be a nation. 

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, and Katz, Michael R., trans. Devils. Oxford University Press, 1999, 265-66.