ABSTRACT
American exceptionalism runs through American political culture and is evoked in numerous tropes in geopolitical discourse. David Campbell (1998) traces its themes from early Puritan texts through much more contemporary articulations of national security. Hofstadter’s (1967) theme of a paranoid style in American politics has long informed geographers concerned to tease out the geographical dimensions of American identity (Agnew 1983). The Cold War invoked numerous threats to America, and given the specification of the putative enemy in the machinations of Soviet power as godless communists, a quasi-religious justification emerged for the prosecution of Cold War (Knelman 1985). These themes permeated American political thinking widely although the exact influence of assumptions of end times and imminent rapture is not easy to identify precisely (Boyer 1992). More recently these themes appear again in critical geopolitical writing where American identity has been examined in terms of the construction of places and popular identities (Sharp 2000; Dittmer 2005) and more specifically in terms of the modes of conduct implicit in how the War on Terror is conducted (Hannah 2006), and the larger geopolitical contextualizations of that war (Dalby 2007, 2008a).
