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Obama’s Nobel

Oct 11, 2009 Editorial

The announcement by the Swedish Academy that the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to US President Barack Obama certainly took the world, including even the winner, by surprise. Traditionally, the prize had been awarded to individuals for accomplishment that led towards peace or at least a lessening of tensions in diverse fields of endeavour.
For a President in the first year of his first term without any notable successes under his belt, the reaction from a stunned nation was, “For what?”
Even Obama appeared nonplussed: “To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honoured by this prize.” However, there was method to the Swedish Academy’s apparent madness. It is an enduring myth that the prize is only about accomplishment — it actually was created as much to supply momentum for peace as to celebrate it. And this was the Academy’s intent: they especially singled out Obama’s aims to create a nuclear weapons-free world and to set out a new, more cooperative diplomatic doctrine.
The Nobel, they said, was for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
“I hope it will help him,” Nobel Committee Chairman, Thorbjoern Jagland, said of the award. “Obama is the right man at the right time, and that’s why we want to enhance his efforts.”
Domestically, there has already been a backlash against Obama since, in the view of his Republican critics, the prize confirms their suspicions that the President is more interested in pleasing the world than securing America’s interests. Accolades for peacemaking do not cut any ice with the right that consider Obama’s huge popularity abroad the result of his “cozying up” with countries they consider to be undermining the US foreign policy.
From the left, even from within his own party, the grouse is that his promises on both the domestic and foreign agendas have all remained just that – promises.
The war in Iraq is still not wound down and the one in Afghanistan has escalated and spilled over into Pakistan. The hoped-for peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians, on which President Obama expended an extraordinary amount of energy and political capital, was scuttled by the hard-nosed recalcitrance of Netanyahu. And the President could do nothing about it.
He has also made bold commitments on climate change – the greatest catastrophe to confront the planet and which if unaddressed could lead to severe social disruptions and conflicts. But it is almost certain that the Senate will not act on the bill before it is issued in time for the global meeting on climate change in Copenhagen this December. The US would then become the stumbling block to any post-Kyoto agreement because it would not have committed itself to any binding cuts in emissions.
Hoping to deflect escalating criticisms, the White House has decided that while the President will accept the Prize, it will be downplayed. “Let me be clear: I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations,” he said.
It is more than ironic that he finished the day he was awarded the Nobel peace prize, closeted with his national security team, continuing his consideration of whether to escalate the war in Afghanistan for a second time since taking office.
In our estimation, President Obama is deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. As Jagland said in Oslo after the announcement, “The question we have to ask is who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world? And who has done more than Barack Obama?”
He has vowed to pursue a world without nuclear weapons; reached out to the Muslim world, delivered a major speech in Cairo in June; and sought to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, at the expense of offending some of his Jewish supporters.
The peace prize can only encourage him to pursue his mission; but the responsibility for success is not only his own.

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