October 7, 2013
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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."
© 2013 Noam Chomsky -- Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate
Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics and philosophy at MIT.
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