WHAT UNITES AND SEPARATES THEM IN MODERN WORLD POLITICS The 44th (already 44th) election held at the very beginning of 2009. the President of the United States probably would not have attracted such a truly universal attention of billions of people around the world, if not for one circumstance: for the first time in the country's 232-year history, Barack Hussein Obama Jr., an African-American, became the new president. This immediately put the question on the agenda: how will the United States of America, a powerful world power, the leader of the Western world, now develop relations with the homeland of his ancestors - Africa? Recently, the Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences published a book summarizing this "sector" of the American president's activities and US African policy for five years, counting from January 20, 2009-the day of Obama's inauguration: "USA-AFRICA: the policy of the Obama Administration. 2009-2014 " (2015, 208 p). Its author is Doctor of Historical Sciences, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the USSR/A. Urnov, Chief Researcher at the Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences, analyzed a truly colossal material describing Washington's African course and the course of its implementation in the political, economic, humanitarian and military fields. Literally "in the first lines" of his work, the author notes the complexity of the situation in which B. Obama found himself. "In Africa, the color of the US president's skin gave his administration credibility." But "in the US, the situation was more complicated. On the African front, Obama should have been careful not to give American voters any reason to suspect, or even accuse, that following the "call of blood", the president pays attention to Africa to the detriment of their welfare and the global interests of the United States" (p.13). The content of the book convinces that Obama managed to maintain this kind of" balance of interests", although the US ... Read more