The world’s last best hope: American exceptionalism and US foreign policy in obama’s era

Abstract

Since Barack Obama came to power, American exceptionalism has been in the center of the political debate in close connection with the issue of US decline in the world stage. This article will deal with American exceptionalism from both a theoretical perspective and from its impact in nowadays US foreign policy. To this end, we will proceed to elucidate the main conceptual aspects of American exceptionalism, analyzing its different interpretations within the framework of the main US foreign policy doctrines. On this theoretical basis, we will analyze the practical influence of the excepcionalist idea in Obama administration’s foreign policy, which has been denounced by its harshest critics as anti-exceptionalist and, by extension, as un-American.