But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think.

Foreign policy deals across time as well as space.

Europeans believe in democracy - or, at least, in republican government - but they have considered the alternatives, and continue to do so, and that scandalizes Americans.

It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant.

The problems of elites is an old one for which Americans have found no solid answer.

The achievement of nationhood is a product not only of time and circumstance but usually of war and suffering as well.

The truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old.