02:56 pm
More Thoughts on Obama’s Peace Prize
When the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced this morning that it was awarding President Barack Obama the Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” Obama became only the third sitting president to receive the honor. The other two were Woodrow Wilson, who received the honor in 1920 for his futile efforts to establish the League of Nations, and to Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 for his negotiating peace between Russia and Japan.
Only nine months into his administration, Obama apparently won the Prize for his tone in reaching out to Muslims, exemplified in his ground breaking speech delivered in Cairo earlier this year; his urging to the international community to address pressing global problems such as climate change and the reduction of nuclear weapons, when he recently addressed the UN General Assembly.
But those are as much aspirations as achievements; no one can argue that Obama won because of anything he’s done. In fact, as Charlie noted on Twitter, it would be a mistake to think Obama got it just because he wasn’t Bush (though let’s not kid ourselves — that most definitely was part of Committee’s thinking). It’s more accurate to say that Obama is being honored for turning the supertanker, so to speak — moving the United States away from the disruptive role it played in world politics and back toward its more traditional role as leader and partner.
Now, as the old saying goes, the proof will be in the pudding. The pressure on Obama to deliver on Afghanistan, Iraq, Middle East peace, climate change, and nonproliferation has just gotten significantly — perhaps exponentially — greater. And then there is that sticky issue of human rights, which seems to have taken a back seat to realism in this administration. More to come on that last point later.
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