AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM:

America vis-ˆ-vis past empires: Compared with past great powers, say the Mongols or Romans, America wields a light touch. (James Norton, September 11, 2002 , The Christian Science Monitor)

After World War II, the United States rebuilt its vanquished foes and cofounded multilateral institutions like NATO, the World Bank, and the United Nations. It turned Germany and Japan into democracies, and built a global alliance of nations, making itself the first among equals.

No other superpower in history has been so multilateral and modest about its status, says Donald Kagan, a professor of classics at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. "It's very important to understand that the ancients were very different from what we are today," he says. "I would say that [America] is the great exception in the history of the world. It hasn't been so long that everybody held the same view that the ancients did, which is: 'Empire is natural, empire is glorious; there's no reason to apologize, one should be very proud of it.' "

But even a modest superpower is not considered a force for good by all. In that sense, historians say, ambivalent attitudes toward the United States today echo the reputations of ancient empires.

Intellectuals like to flagellate us for how little we comprehend the rest of the world, when, in fact, it's astounding how little the rest of the world understands us, by any measure the most significant nation going. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 17, 2002 10:20 AM