President Obama’s landmark speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize has been widely hailed as a sober ethical reflection on the perennial quandary facing heads of state, “the relationship between war and peace.” Despite its eloquence and idealism, his speech never strayed far from those core doctrines of American exceptionalism that constitute major impediments to peace in our day. To the contrary, the president’s failure to describe accurately the role of the United States in recent history shows the powerful gravitational force of that Manichean ideology that poses the U.S. as the savior of a benighted world. Read more at left, and on my blog On Second Thought.