What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign PolicyFor two hundred years, Americans have believed that they have an obligation to improve the lot of humanity, a belief that has consistently shaped U. S. foreign policy. Yet within this consensus, there are two competing schools of thought: the exemplarist school (Brands' term) which holds that what America chiefly owes the world is the benign example of a well functioning democracy, and the vindicationist school which argues that force must sometimes