The American Paradox: Isolation and Internationalism in the 21st Century

What do Spider-Man, Captain America and Superman have to do with U.S. foreign policy?
In The American Paradox, Kılıç Buğra Kanat delivers a provocative and sweeping narrative that begins not in the halls of Washington, but in the pages of comic books—where the American superhero was born, burdened by the same dilemma that has haunted the United States for over a century: Should great power be used to save others, or withheld in the name of restraint?
From the isolationist roots of George Washington’s Farewell Address to the firestorms of Vietnam, the unilateralism of the Bush Doctrine, and the populist backlash under Donald Trump, this book explores the evolving tension between America’s desire to lead and its impulse to retreat.
Through vivid storytelling and rigorous analysis, Kanat traces how each modern president—from Bush to Biden—has struggled to define America’s role in a fractured, unpredictable world.
At the heart of this work is a striking metaphor: the superhero’s moral crisis as a mirror of the nation’s geopolitical
identity crisis. Like Peter Parker grappling with the consequences of action and inaction, or Superman torn between power and personal sacrifice, the United States oscillates between intervention and wary disengagement. And few symbols capture this better than Captain America, who burst onto the cultural scene punching Hitler before Pearl Harbor and came to embody a wartime moral clarity that American foreign policy would later struggle to sustain.