In Defense of Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

By Ben Adler and Daniel Stone

Finally, there's something that Hizbullah and the Republican National Committee can agree about. The reasons that President Obama should not have won the Nobel Peace Prize have been well established here and across the political spectrum. Of course, there are people who have saved more lives, if that's the measure of who should win the award. And by giving it to Obama now it raises the question: what if Obama actually does make monumental achievements in global peace as president? Or what if he does not? What if, say, he embroils the U.S. in a deadly quagmire in Afghanistan, or by exiting Afghanistan and Iraq prematurely leaves behind chaos and violence? Alas, as with National Magazine Awards, there are no retractions for Nobels that look undeserved in hindsight.

But the immediate consensus that Obama is a ludicrously undeserving choice, and that his selection is pure political hackery on the part of the committee, is a little too sure of itself. Why is Martin Luther King Jr. held up as an obviously correct choice and Obama as an obviously wrong one? Obama will likely go down in U.S. history—regardless of his record in foreign affairs—as the greatest single civil-rights hero since King. Like King, Obama won, merely by his election, a major victory over the history of (often violent) racism in America, the world's most powerful nation. And he did so on a platform of multilateralism and foreign engagement from Iran to Cuba that was controversial even within his own party. In the Senate he forged a strong relationship with über-realist Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) to work together on preventing nuclear proliferation. He was the only major candidate in either party who could claim he opposed the Iraq War before it began.

So, when you consider the fact that Obama was nominated before he had even done anything as president, you certainly could see it as an extension of Europe's middle finger to his predecessor. But you could also see it as an award not for his concrete policy successes but for his personal achievement to be elected the first African-American president, the child of an immigrant and a single mother, with a Muslim name, an Asian stepfather and half-sister, a wife who descended from slaves. And/or it could be for his achievement for being elected president on an international platform that the Nobel committee considers a refreshing humanitarian turn for the world's great hyperpower. Or for giving his moving speech on race in Philadelphia, or for addressing 200,000 Berliners, or his conciliatory speeches at the last two Democratic conventions, or his pragmatic address to a Chicago antiwar rally in 2002.

It's hardly a no-brainer that he, above all others, should have won, and so early in his presidency, but it's not necessarily just the fanboy-ism and Republican hatred of the Nobel committee. Maybe it is star-struck statesmen jabbing at George W. Bush, John McCain, and all the other Iraq hawks and global-warming deniers and dillydalliers whom most of Europe so despise, and also an award for some achievements that are legitimate.

And wasn't it ever thus? What prize isn't political? Indeed, as Rush Limbaugh has pointed out to my colleague Eve Conant, the Nobel committee has been rewarding Democrats, such as Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, in recent years. And, as Limbaugh mentions, Ronald Reagan also went to Berlin and made a plea for world peace and integration. Reagan played a role in liberating Eastern Europe, and articulated a vision of a world without nuclear weapons. Although his pursuit of national missile defense had the practical effect of spooking the Soviet Union, recent biographies make it clear that Reagan sincerely believed that if it came to fruition he would share the system and eliminate the utility of nuclear weapons. Did Reagan get a Nobel for any of this? Or share Mikhail Gorbachev's? No.

So, complain that the Nobel isn't evenhanded in American politics. Or find a conservative country (Poland?) to endow and host an alternative Peace Prize. But saying Obama is completely undeserving seems a little strong. And it means that, like most Americans today, you're siding with the terrorists.