Hello, my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics. Today's Talking Politics

Guide is with Andrew Preston, Professor of American History here at Cambridge and an

expert on American diplomacy. It's a guide to American foreign policy.

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When America was founded, what was their idea of what made it different and how it was

going to conduct itself in the world?

Well, it was an experiment in democratic self-governance or it was an experiment in republican

self-governance and that's the thing that first and foremost made it different. At the

time, Americans felt very much a part of the world. Certainly, the American elites felt

very much a part of the world. They were part of the British Empire and they still wanted

to be a part of the world. But they also wanted to separate themselves to a certain extent

from what was going on in Britain and from how Britain saw the world and what the mother

country thought was best for the American colonies.

So what was the moral mission back in the founding base?

I'm not sure there was a moral mission aside from self-determination or what would later

be called self-determination and founding a new country. There were certainly a lot of

motivating ideas behind the American founding that were moral in terms of self-governance

and representation and democracy and republicanism. And the American founders certainly wanted

to spread those ideas, but not necessarily as we think American foreign policy wants

...