In this Nov. 5, 2008 file photo U.S. Army Sgt. Kyle Whalen, 22, from Plover, Wis., playfully taps his helmet with an Iraqi boy's donated toy football helmet during a visit to the boy's school in Mosul, 360 kilometers (225 miles) northwest of Baghdad, Iraq. When 21st-century Americans contemplate their place on the planet, they confront a complex history of isolationism and engagement, a deep instinct to live and let live that co-exists with an equally fervent desire to be a robust beacon of freedom _ sometimes by any means necessary.

New York ? George Washington, first president, said this: “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”

Eldridge Cleaver, civil rights leader, said this: “Americans think of themselves collectively as a huge rescue squad on 24-hour call.”

Toby Keith, populist country singer, said: “This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage — and you’ll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A.”

Now: Place those three divergent sentiments in a large bowl. Whip vigorously until blended. There you’ll have, in one curious, often contradictory recipe, the world-changing, world-shaking world view of the quixotic species known as the American people.

When 21st-century Americans contemplate their place on the planet, they confront a complex history of isolationism and engagement, a deep instinct to live and let live that coexists with an equally fervent desire to be a robust beacon of freedom — sometimes by any means necessary.

That means that, while a presidential transition offers many limbos, none is quite so stark as the expected change in the approach, method and technique of foreign policy that will come with the inauguration of Barack Obama on Tuesday.

“It’s a very plastic moment,” says Eric Rauchway, author of “Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America.”

Change in outlook

The arrival of Obama and his secretary of state designate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, represents a baton-passing between two distinct versions of the American world view — George W. Bush’s interventionist, we-know-best foreign policy and Obama’s vow to “restore our moral standing.”

Both of those outlooks have their merits and their supporters. In the era after 9/11, particularly, Americans’ hunger for security in the “homeland” is fervent — enough so that we re-elected Bush in 2004 more than a year after he ordered the invasion of Iraq on a false premise.

Nevertheless, polls show an increasing dissatisfaction with how America plays with others in the international sandbox, and the neoconservatives who pushed a more aggressive American position toward the world — men such as Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz — left the Bush administration years ago.

But when a new president gazes out upon the republic and looks for clues to consider the American mood toward the world and craft policy accordingly, sometimes it’s all quite difficult to figure out.

We are a welcoming people who have embraced waves of immigrants who have changed us — and keep changing us — in productive ways. Yet ours is a suspicious land where accusations of Frenchness helped sour voters against John Kerry and, days after 9/11, anti-Muslim sentiment claimed the life of an Indian Sikh — the cultural equivalent of mistaking a pine tree for a chrysanthemum bush.

This is a country where ordering Chinese takeout has become a fundamentally American activity, yet also where legions of non-passport-holders who devour the mediated experiences of “Morocco” and “Japan” at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center would never dream of visiting the real thing.

“We need others and others need us. And we don’t like that,” says Schuyler Foerster, president of the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh, one of many such groups that work with their regions to facilitate American engagement with the world.

Introverts or extroverts?

Jack Holmes, a political scientist at Hope College in Holland, Mich., studies long-term foreign policy trends. He says American attitudes typically pinball every couple of decades between two phases, “introvert” and “extrovert,” and are approaching the end of an extrovert phase.

He doesn’t expect an introverted Obama administration but thinks the public is ready for changes in strategy, tactics and tone.

“Americans are never quite happy with what their role is in the world. Either they want to show the world how to do it, or sit back and set an example that the world can follow,” Holmes says. But with a sharp change in policy and attitude potentially at hand, he says, “The American public is at a very important moment when it comes to how this country sees itself.”

Evidence is everywhere, and has been for many generations, that this country sees itself as a “shining city upon a hill,” as one of its earliest leaders, John Winthrop, put it — a metaphor that Ronald Reagan reintroduced effectively in the 1980s.

“Inspiration is our export,” says Ted Widmer, author of “Ark of the Liberties: America and the World.”

That tendency to be a model for humanity created a magnificent society built on ideas and ideals — and also got a lot of people killed.

It is the instinct that makes Americans the most philanthropic people in the world. It also makes them a wellspring of resentment by nations that bristle at what they call U.S. arrogance — something that perplexes many good Americans who say they are only trying to help.

“I think we do underestimate the degree that our actions are considered by people of other countries,” Widmer says.

In fact, when foreigners actually visit America they seem to come away charmed. U.S. Travel, the leading industry group for the travel sector, surveyed more than 2,000 foreign nationals and found those who had visited the United States were 74 percent more likely to have a favorable opinion about Americans than those who had not.