Basic Trope: When the world is in trouble, it's America that rolls up its sleeves and saves the day.
- Straight: Aliens start attacking major world cities. Most countries fall into disorder, but the American military defeats the aliens practically single-handedly.
- Exaggerated: Most of the world immediately capitulate and welcome our new alien overlords. America destroys them in a complete and utter Curb-Stomp Battle.
- Every single U.S President — living or dead — appear to drive away the aliens.
- Downplayed: America leads a world coalition to create spacecraft to fight the alien invaders. The team of heroes that takes down the aliens for good is led by an American, (and English is the lingua franca), but recruits members from around the world.
- Justified:
- America's military is stationed globally, and among the world's most powerful and advanced.
- In-universe, America has faced a smaller scale alien attack, and is better prepared than the rest of the planet.
- For some reason, aliens don't attack the United States, so the US is the only country not dealing with attacks.
- Inverted:
- America needs Canada, Mexico, and the EU to rescue it from the aliens.
- Or, America are the villains.
- A country that is a well-known adversary of the United States (Such as China, Iran or Russia) is the one who saves the world from the alien invasion.
- Subverted:
- The American military sends up a few nukes, and it looks like the aliens are taken care of — until the second wave hits, and America gets the retaliatory strike. Now it has to work with its fellow nations to save the entire world.
- When a Notzilla begins to rampage through Japan, the Japanese government creates a group full of Worm Guys, many of them ex-pats from other countries with a couple of noticeable American members who are by far the least useful members of the team.
- Double Subverted:
- ... Until all of the world's armies fail, one by one, and the US is the last line of defense!
- When the time comes for destroying the Notzilla, the operation goes completely pear-shaped up until one of said American ex-pats grabs the anti-Notzilla weapon and successfully pulls off a kamikaze attack with it. The film ends with the surviving worm guys saying a Gallows Humor one-liner where they wonder about America claiming that they killed the monster by proxy.
- Parodied:
- America has a check list of everything that needs to happen in an Alien Invasion before they're allowed to do anything about it.
- Samuel Wilson (A.K.A, THE Uncle Sam) rises from the dead, and proves to be a One-Man Army.
"I WANT YOU TO HELP ME FIGHT THOSE BLASTED ALIENS!"- The part of continent USA is on rises from the ground to help other countries.
- The world is saved by a bunch of lower-middle-class yokels (or if it's funnier, Lower Class Louts) from a part of the U.S.A. that nobody in the U.S. cares about.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: The United States doesn't play a bigger role than any other nation in the alien war.
- Enforced: Writers have a tendency to see their own countries as the good guys in wars that are international or larger.
- Lampshaded: "Pushy Americans, always showing up late for every war!"
- Invoked: Americans deliberately make themselves look like terrible targets so that Aliens won't want to attack them, therefore allowing them to launch sneak attacks and save the day.
- Exploited: The aliens attack the American Military, and the other countries aren't sure what to do.
- Defied: America sets up an intergovernmental organisation to make sure they can prevent wars from happening.
- Discussed: "Have you noticed every time there's an alien invasion, it's always them Yankees saving our bacon?"
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: The USA government enacts a pre-emptive strike on the aliens, but the latter turned out to have been peaceful envoys, resulting in the aliens declaring war on Earth in retaliation.
- It turns out that the whole thing is American military propaganda. In reality, the aliens are not only peaceful, but America was the one who attacked them because they wanted the aliens' technology and resources for the power and profit of the politicians and corporations. But they needed a legitimate sounding excuse to not be labeled as the aggressor, and thus deliberately fudged up the truth for their own gain and to be praised as the hero of a conflict that they started to "save the day".
- Reconstructed: It's the USA who goes on calls for peace and takes up responsibility for what they did to end the war on non-peaceful terms.
- Implied: Following an unknown cataclysm that shattered the world order, America Takes Over the World, suggesting that they might have been the one who fixed things.
Back to America Saves the Day, boys! C'mon, those other nations won't rescue themselves!
