Opinion and scholarship seem to differ with regard to how consistent American foreign policy is and has been across time. Some scholars have argued that there is consistency in American foreign policy—that U.S. foreign policy is both reflective of and contributes to the exceptionalism inherent in American history .Originating most tangibly with de Tocqueville’s observations, American exceptionalism is represented in the notion that the United States inherited a “special spiritual and political destiny” – that the U.S. is a shining become of liberty to the rest of the world. The argument goes that American exceptionalism remains a dominant component of American national identity and by extension is promoted through its foreign policy, embracing as it does the language of the nation’s founding document : liberty, democracy, and independence