EN
The last years of the nineteenth century and the fi rst decades of the twentieth are extremely important for American foreign policy. This was when the United States entered the elite club of world powers. This was also the moment when the United States began to play a major role in international relations, the role that it has played until the present day. We can observe some similarities in American foreign policy of those times and the present. In this paper, the author concentrates on the American mission. The author also analyzes American exceptionalism in U.S. Latin American policy. It would be helpful to answer an important question: was U.S. Latin American policy at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a realization of American exceptionalism or just American realpolitik?