The recent Obama-Putin tiff over American exceptionalism reignited an ongoing debate over the Obama Doctrine: Is the president veering toward isolationism? Or will he proudly carry the banner of exceptionalism?

The debate is narrower than it may seem. There is considerable common ground between the two positions, as was expressed clearly by Hans Morgenthau, the founder of the now dominant no-sentimentality "realist" school of international relations.

Throughout his work, Morgenthau describes America as unique among all powers past and present in that it has a "transcendent purpose" that it "must defend and promote" throughout the world: "the establishment of equality in freedom."

The competing concepts "exceptionalism" and "isolationism" both accept this doctrine and its various elaborations but differ with regard to its application.

One extreme was vigorously defended by President Obama in his Sept. 10 address to the nation: "What makes America different," he declared, "what makes us exceptional," is that we are dedicated to act, "with humility, but with resolve," when we detect violations somewhere.

"For nearly seven decades the United States has been the anchor of global security," a role that "has meant more than forging international agreements; it has meant enforcing them."

The competing doctrine, isolationism, holds that we can no longer afford to carry out the noble mission of racing to put out the fires lit by others. It takes seriously a cautionary note sounded 20 years ago by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that "granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy" may lead us to neglect our own interests in our devotion to the needs of others.

Between these extremes, the debate over foreign policy rages.

At the fringes, some observers reject the shared assumptions, bringing up the historical record: for example, the fact that "for nearly seven decades" the United States has led the world in aggression and subversion - overthrowing elected governments and imposing vicious dictatorships, supporting horrendous crimes, undermining international agreements and leaving trails of blood, destruction and misery.

To these misguided creatures, Morgenthau provided an answer. A serious scholar, he recognized that America has consistently violated its "transcendent purpose."

But to bring up this objection, he explains, is to commit "the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds." It is the transcendent purpose of America that is "reality"; the actual historical record is merely "the abuse of reality."

In short, "American exceptionalism" and "isolationism" are generally understood to be tactical variants of a secular religion, with a grip that is quite extraordinary, going beyond normal religious orthodoxy in that it can barely even be perceived. Since no alternative is thinkable, this faith is adopted reflexively.

Others express the doctrine more crudely. One of President Reagan's U.N. ambassadors, Jeane Kirkpatrick, devised a new method to deflect criticism of state crimes. Those unwilling to dismiss them as mere "blunders" or "innocent naivete" can be charged with "moral equivalence" - of claiming that the U.S. is no different from Nazi Germany, or whoever the current demon may be. The device has since been widely used to protect power from scrutiny.

Even serious scholarship conforms. Thus in the current issue of the journal Diplomatic History, scholar Jeffrey A. Engel reflects on the significance of history for policy makers.

Engel cites Vietnam, where, "depending on one's political persuasion," the lesson is either "avoidance of the quicksand of escalating intervention [isolationism] or the need to provide military commanders free rein to operate devoid of political pressure" - as we carried out our mission to bring stability, equality and freedom by destroying three countries and leaving millions of corpses.

The Vietnam death toll continues to mount into the present because of the chemical warfare that President Kennedy initiated there - even as he escalated American support for a murderous dictatorship to all-out attack, the worst case of aggression during Obama's "seven decades."

Another "political persuasion" is imaginable: the outrage Americans adopt when Russia invades Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. But the secular religion bars us from seeing ourselves through a similar lens.

One mechanism of self-protection is to lament the consequences of our failure to act. Thus New York Times columnist David Brooks, ruminating on the drift of Syria to "Rwanda-like" horror, concludes that the deeper issue is the Sunni-Shiite violence tearing the region asunder.

That violence is a testimony to the failure "of the recent American strategy of light-footprint withdrawal" and the loss of what former foreign service officer Gary Grappo calls the "moderating influence of American forces."

Those still deluded by "abuse of reality" - that is, fact - might recall that the Sunni-Shiite violence resulted from the worst crime of aggression of the new millennium, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And those burdened with richer memories might recall that the Nuremberg Trials sentenced Nazi criminals to hanging because, according to the Tribunal's judgment, aggression is "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

The same lament is the topic of a celebrated study by Samantha Power, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In "A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide," Power writes about the crimes of others and our inadequate response.

She devotes a sentence to one of the few cases during the seven decades that might truly rank as genocide: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Tragically, the United States "looked away," Power reports.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her predecessor as U.N. ambassador at the time of the invasion, saw the matter differently. In his book "A Dangerous Place," he described with great pride how he rendered the U.N. "utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook" to end the aggression, because "the United States wished things to turn out as they did."

And indeed, far from looking away, Washington gave a green light to the Indonesian invaders and immediately provided them with lethal military equipment. The U.S. prevented the U.N. Security Council from acting and continued to lend firm support to the aggressors and their genocidal actions, including the atrocities of 1999, until President Clinton called a halt - as could have happened anytime during the previous 25 years.

But that is mere abuse of reality.

It is all too easy to continue, but also pointless. Brooks is right to insist that we should go beyond the terrible events before our eyes and reflect about the deeper processes and their lessons.

Among these, no task is more urgent than to free ourselves from the religious doctrines that consign the actual events of history to oblivion and thereby reinforce our basis for further "abuses of reality."
(c) 2013 Noam Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is co-author, with Gilbert Achcar, of Perilous Power: The Middle East & U.S. Foreign Policy: Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War, and Justice. His most recent book is Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire.

BINYAMIN NETANYAHU aroused my pity. From my 10 years of membership in the Knesset I know how unpleasant it is to speak before an empty hall.

His die-hard followers - a pathetic residue of Casino magnates and burnt-out Zionist right-wingers - sat in the gallery and an over-blown Israeli delegation sat in the hall, but they only underlined the general emptiness. Depressing.

How different from President Hassan Rouhani's reception! Then the hall was overcrowded, the General Secretary and the other dignitaries leapt from their seats to congratulate him at the end, the international media could not get enough of him.

Much of Netanyahu's misfortune was just bad luck. It was the end of the session, everybody was eager to get home or go shopping, no one was in the mood to listen to yet another lecture on Jewish history. Enough is enough.

Worse, the speech was totally eclipsed by a world-shaking event - the shutdown of the federal government. The breakdown of the celebrated US system of governance - something like an administrative 9/11 - was a riveting sight. Netanyahu - Netanya who? - just could not compete.

PERHAPS THERE there was also a tiny bit of schadenfreude in the delegates' reaction to our Prime Minister.

In his General Assembly speech last year he assumed the role of the world's primary school teacher, using primitive teaching aids on the rostrum, drawing a line in red ink on a third-grade presentation of the Bomb.

For weeks now Israeli propaganda has been telling the world's leaders that they are childishly naive or just plain stupid. Perhaps they didn't didn't appreciate being told that. Perhaps they were reinforced in their belief that the Israelis (or worse, the Jews) are overbearing, condescending and patronizing. Perhaps it was just one arrogant speech too many?

All this is very sad. Sad for Netanyahu. He invested so much effort in this speech. For him, a speech before the General Assembly (or the US Congress) is like a major battle for a renowned general, a historic event. He lives from speech to speech, weighing in advance every sentence, practicing over and over again the body language, the inflections, like the accomplished actor he is.

And here he was, the great Shakespearean, declaiming "To be or not to be" before an empty hall, rudely disturbed by the snoring of the sole gentleman in the second row.

COULD OUR propaganda line have been less boring?

Of course it could.

Before setting foot on American soil, Netanyahu knew that the world was sighing with relief at the signs of the new Iranian attitude. Though he may be convinced that the ayatollahs were cheating (as usual, he would say) was it wise to appear as a serial killjoy?

He could have said: "We welcome the new tones coming out of Tehran. We listened with much sympathy to Mr. Rouhani's speech. Together with the entire world, represented by this august assembly, we very much hope that the Iranian leadership is sincere, and that in serious negotiations a fair and effective solution can be found.

"However, we cannot ignore the possibility that this charm offensive is but a smokescreen behind which Mr. Rouhani's internal enemies continue to build the nuclear bomb, which threatens all of us. Therefore we expect all of us will exercise utmost caution in conducting the negotiations..."

It's the tone that makes the music.

INSTEAD, OUR Prime Minister threatened again - and more sharply than ever - with an Israeli attack on Iran.

He brandished a revolver which, everybody knows, is empty.

This possibility - as I have repeatedly pointed out - never really existed. Geography, world economic and political circumstances make an attack on Iran impossible.

Bur even if it had been real at some time - it is quite out of the question now. The world is against it. The US public is most definitely against it.

An attack by Israel acting alone, in face of resolute American opposition, is as probable as an Israeli settlement on the moon. Slightly unlikely.

I don't know about the military feasibility. Could it be done? Could our Air Force do it without US assistance and support? Even if the answer were positive, the political circumstances forbid it. Indeed, our military chiefs seem singularly uninterested in such an adventure.

THE CLIMAX of the speech was Netanyahu's grandiose declaration: "if we have to stand alone, we shall stand alone!"

What did it remind me of? In late 1940 there appeared in Palestine - and, I suppose, throughout the British Empire - a superb propaganda poster. France had fallen, Hitler had not yet invaded the Soviet Union, the US was still far from intervening. The poster showed Winston Churchill, undaunted, and a slogan: "Alright then, alone!"

Netanyahu could not remember this, though his memory does seem to be pre-natal. I call it "Alzheimer in reverse" - vividly remembering things that never happened. (He once recounted at length how he, as a boy, had a discussion with a British soldier in the streets of Jerusalem - though the last British soldier left the country more than a year before he was born.)

The phrase Netanyahu was looking for dates from 1896 - the year Theodor Herzl published his epochal work "Der Judenstaat". A British statesman coined the catchword "Splendid Isolation" to characterize British policy under Benjamin Disraeli and his successor.

Actually, the slogan originated in Canada, when a politician spoke about Britain's isolation during the Napoleonic wars: "Never did the 'Empress Island' appear so magnificently grand - she stood by herself, and there was a peculiar splendor in the loneliness of her glory!"

Does Netanyahu see himself as the reincarnation of Winston Churchill, standing proud and undaunted against a continent engulfed by the Nazis?

And where does that leave Barack Obama?

WE KNOW where. Netanyahu and his followers constantly remind us.

Obama is the modern Neville Chamberlain.

Chamberlain the Appeaser. The man who flourished a piece of paper in the fall of 1938 and proclaimed "Peace in Our Time.. The statesman who almost brought about the destruction of his country.

In this version of history, we are now witnessing the Second Munich. A repeat of the infamous agreement between Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Edouard Daladier and Neville Chamberlain, in which the Sudetenland, a province belonging to Czechoslovakia though inhabited by Germans, was turned over to Nazi Germany, leaving democratic little Czechoslovakia defenseless. Half a year later, Hitler invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia. Another few months and World War II broke out when he marched into Poland.

Historical analogies are always dangerous, especially in the hands of politicians and commentators with only superficial historical knowledge.

Let's see about Munich. In the analogy, Hitler's place is taken by Ali Khamenei, or perhaps Hassan Rouhani. Indeed? Do they have the world's strongest military machine, as Hitler already had at that time?

And does Netanyahu himself look like Eduard Benes, the Czech president who trembled before Hitler?

And President Obama, does he resemble Chamberlain, the leader of an enfeebled and practically defenseless Britain, in desperate need of time to rearm? Does Obama surrender to a fanatical dictator?

Or is it Iran that is giving up - or pretending to give up - its nuclear ambitions, brought to its knees by the stringent set of American-dictated international sanctions?

(By the way, the Munich analogy was even more cockeyed when it was recently applied in Israel to the American-Russian agreement about Syria. There, Bashar al-Assad assumed the role of the victorious Hitler, and Obama was the naïve Englishman with the umbrella. Yet it was Assad who gave up his precious chemical weapons, while Obama gave nothing, except a postponement of military action. What kind of a "Munich" was that?)

COMING BACK to reality: there is nothing splendid about the isolation of Israel these days.

Our Isolation means weakness, a loss of power, a diminishing of security.

It is the job of a statesman to find allies, to build partnerships, to strengthen the international position of his country.

Netanyahu has lately taken to quoting our ancient sages: "If I am not for me, who is for me?"

"The sanctity of U.S. Treasury notes is what holds the nation - and its global empire - together." The government shutdown battle is more like a Civil War reenactment than the real thing. A face-saving bargain will soon be struck, returning 825,000 furloughed federal employees to their jobs at wages that have been frozen for the past two years - not by the Republicans, but on President Obama's orders. The clock has been stuck with both hands on "austerity" since Obama came fully out of the closet as a GOP fellow-traveler following the 2010 midterm elections. From that moment on, Republican-imposed gridlock has been the only barrier to Obama's long-sought Grand Bargain to eviscerate entitlement programs. When the current theatrics are over, Obamacare will remain intact and the president will be back on his ever-rightward stride. The GOP will take Obama up on his offer, earlier this year, to cut Social Security and will probably be offered other bits and pieces of the social safety net in the interest of "shared sacrifice" and domestic peace.

In the interim, while the reenactors haul their cannons around the cow pasture, waiting for the rich people who call themselves "markets" to signal an end to the charade, rest assured that national security is sacrosanct.

For example, the pause in some government spending will have minimal effect on the National Security Agency's spying on Americans and the rest of the Earth's inhabitants. The NSA circulated a memo stating that its "intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance activities required to support national or military requirements necessary for national security" are exempt from the fiscal exercise, as are all programs that are necessary for "protection of life and property." Presumably, that means President Obama can still spend next Tuesday morning selecting the week's victims for his Kill List.

Protection of property being the prime directive of both wings of the Corporate Party, democracy will remain in shutdown mode in Detroit and all of Michigan's largely Black cities, whatever happens on Capitol Hill. The markets are hungry to devour the nation's pension funds, and have chosen Black locales to perfect the model, secure in the knowledge that nobody of consequence will raise a finger to stop them from filching the nest-eggs of the undeserving classes.

The disenfranchisement of Detroit under the iron rule of a corporate lawyer is simply another form of "shared sacrifice" necessitated by austerity - which is why the Obama administration challenges voter ID cards in North Carolina but does not deploy the Justice Department to re-enfranchise the majority of Blacks in the state of Michigan, whose votes have been rendered worthless. Detroit's ability to borrow money - or, in this case, to be stripped of every asset of value for the benefit of Wall Street bankers - trumps citizenship rights, every time.

The same logic will dictate that the Republicans turn the spigot back on. Forget about social justice, the rule of law, and political decorum. The sanctity of U.S. Treasury notes is what holds the nation - and its global empire - together. As the "liberal" economist Paul Krugman writes, "Financial markets have long treated U.S. bonds as the ultimate safe asset; the assumption that America will always honor its debts is the bedrock on which the world financial system rests." Which is another way of saying that the U.S. maintains its supremacy in the world, not merely by force of arms, but through the artificial supremacy of the dollar, as the world reserve currency. Should the dollar fall from its pedestal, the Empire would have to go out with guns blazing. Or, alternatively, the U.S. would be compelled to adjust to simply being one nation among many on the planet - a prospect too horrible to contemplate.

The announcement of this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, set for October 11, is sure to make big news. The prize remains the most prestigious in the world. But the award has fallen into an evasive pattern, ignoring the USA's continuous "war on terror" and even giving it tacit support.

In his 1895 will, the dynamite inventor and ammunition magnate Alfred Nobel specified that Norway's parliament should elect a five-member committee for awarding the prize to "champions of peace." Yet the list of recent Nobel peace laureates is notably short on such champions. Instead, the erstwhile politicians on the Norwegian Nobel Committee have largely bypassed the original purpose of the prize.

Despite all its claims of independence, the Oslo-based Nobel Committee is enmeshed in Norwegian politics. The global prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize has obscured the reality that its selection committee is chosen by leaders of Norway's main political parties-and, as a member of NATO, Norway is deeply entangled in the military alliance.

When the Nobel Peace Prize went to President Obama in 2009, he was in the midst of drastically escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, in tandem with the rest of NATO. The same prize went to the European Union in 2012, a year after many of its member states intervened with military force in Libya. On both occasions, in effect, the Nobel Committee bestowed a "good war-making seal of approval."

Since 2001, the Nobel Peace Prize has been on a prolonged detour around the U.S. government's far-flung warfare, declining to honor anyone who had challenged any of it anywhere in the world. But the Nobel Committee has done more than just ignore peace activism seeking to stop U.S.-led war efforts. By giving the Peace Prize to Obama and the E.U., the committee has implicitly endorsed those military efforts as part of a rhetorical process that conflates war-making with peace-making. Orwell's 1984 specter of "War Is Peace" looms uncomfortably large.

At times, the Peace Prize has earned goodwill in NGO circles by honoring humanitarian work that is laudable but not directly related to peace. And so far in this century, when the Nobel Committee has focused the prize on human rights, it has danced around Uncle Sam's global shadow. The Peace Prize has gone only to dissidents in countries where governments are in conflict with Washington-such as Shirin Ebadi of Iran in 2003 and Liu Xiaobo of China in 2010-while failing to honor any of the profuse activism against severe abuses by U.S.-backed governments.

It was not always this way. During previous decades, the annual announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize might alternately please or enrage the top leaders in the capital of a world power. In 1983, the awarding of the prize to Poland's Solidarity leader Lech Walesa infuriated the Kremlin. When the 1992 prize went to Rigoberta Menchu, an indigenous foe of U.S.-supported tyrants killing Guatemalan civilians in large numbers, it was a much-needed rebuke to Washington.

Yes, some Peace Prize choices were dubious or worse. After an Orwellian one, the caustic songwriter Tom Lehrer commented: "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize." In an exercise of absurd equivalency, the Nobel Committee had given the 1973 prize to Kissinger and North Vietnam's negotiator Le Duc Tho.

The 1980s brought the Peace Prize to brave activists like Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina and Desmond Tutu of South Africa, as well as International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. In 1996, longtime opponents of Indonesia's U.S.-backed genocidal occupation of East Timor had reason to cheer when the Nobel Peace Prize went to East Timorese heroes Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta. The next year also brought good news when the prize went to Jody Williams and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.