"When we want to assert our exceptionalism, Israel has consistently supported that assertion..."

"...  Yglesias says in his piece that Israel does nothing for America – Israel is a burden, nothing more. This isn’t entirely true – Israel has, for example, proved a useful partner in intelligence-gathering in the past, helped battlefield-test American weapons back when we weren’t fighting so many wars ourselves, and was a useful proxy for undertaking certain unsavory tasks. But against this must be set Israel’s repeated violations of basic rules of friendship – spying on us, re-selling sensitive technology to our rivals without permission, etc. And that’s before you get into the question of whether Israel is a geopolitical asset or a significant liability.

But Israel has been a particular friend to America in one respect. When we want to assert our exceptionalism, Israel has consistently supported that assertion. Much of the rest of the world wants to subject American power to something resembling a system of laws and norms through institutions like the International Criminal Court. America, for understandable reasons, has resisted this, even when parts of the system were our own creations, designed to legitimate our own supremacy by limiting its absolute scope. We can debate whether our resistance is wise or not, but my point is that Israel has been consistently supportive of our resistance – again for obvious reasons. The psychological component of this comraderie is that we are simultaneously able to maintain our sense of ourselves as boundless and universal, and relieved of some of the burden of our solitude in such a position..."