Americans and Everyone Else: The Origins and Meaning of US Foreign Policy

No matter how events unfold in the world, the United States of America remains one of the key players on the global stage. Their actions—whether people like it or not—spark a lively response in other countries. Some want to copy the U.S. model, others want to do the opposite, and still others simply want to learn from their experience. But what exactly is the “American model,” if it has attracted such interest for more than a century? What factors of domestic and foreign policy led America to take shape in precisely the way it exists today?

Well-known American historian Ivan Kurilla examines how the key elements of the American model formed—democracy, exceptionalism, messianism, and much more; how expansionism replaced isolationism; and how idealism and rationalism combine. One of the main factors in shaping the American model, the author sees in the endless search for—and the opposition to—“the Other”: the English colonizers, Native Americans, supporters of preserving slavery, the policies of Tsarist Russia and the USSR, and in recent years, the rise of China and Russia’s return to the international arena.