To speak and write about the Romanian-American relations means to decipher the struggle of both peoples to rise from the ranks on the stage of History. The Romanians, at the crossroads of several empires, fought for state survival, while the Americans fought to assert their independence from another imperial yoke, but better positioned geographically. Geography was generous for both peoples – Romania enjoyed a strategic position of civilization confluence, whereas the United States was a territory between two oceans from which the future American nation could project its civilizational model.
Both peoples lived critical and tragic moments, the Romanians under foreign rule, the Americans in the struggle to find a different civilizational model from that of Old Europe and to seek a meaning of history. American exceptionalism was born out of this frantic search for the path of history. Romanian exceptionalism presupposed resistance to a relentless history and a provocative geography.