Why Obama Deserves the Nobel Peace Prize (media round-up)
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Related subjects: Obama administration, Opinion, Riga Listin, The Global Intercept, U.S. news, U.S. Politics Comments Off
One day after the world was shocked by the surprise award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the United States’ young first-term president, Barack Obama, statements of dismay and/or congratulation have given way to more cogent analysis of the important new direction Obama has brought to international relations of all kinds.
NATO’s secretary general says the Nobel award is “well deserved” by Pres. Obama, for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. EarthTimes reports:
Brussels – US President Barack Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Friday. “(Obama) has also demonstrated his strong commitment to help build peace and defend fundamental human rights, including through the Atlantic Alliance. This honour is well deserved,” NATO’s secretary general said in a statement.
NATO is actively engaged in stopping nuclear proliferation, one of Obama’s priorities, while the US president’s fresh approach to Russia has helped defrost relations between Moscow and the transatlantic alliance.
Echoing some of the spirit of NATO chief’s praise for Obama, the Kansas City Star editorial board published the following:
Barack Obama has inspired. He has elevated. He has brought hope to people around the world. He has reinvigorated dialogues that seemed long dead, or hidden on back burners.
For that, on Friday, he was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Star editorial board notes how “frighteningly exclusive” is the list of Nobel Peace laureates, noting not even Mahatma Gandhi was so honored. But they went on to explain that while Obama seems to be just starting on his work to foster better relations in the global community, his work to date has had a profound moral and political effect in many nations, stating that:
Obama does share something with many who have accepted this award before him including Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel, Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr. and Lech Walesa: The ability to lift eyes upward, to prompt dreams of a better future.
The prize is only sometimes given out for accomplishments. As commonly, it is awarded to give strength to a position, to provide gravitas for a noble individual struggling for peace against a corrupt system.
Professor M. Zahidul Haque, chairman of the Department of Agricultural Extension & Information Systems at Dhaka’s Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, wrote the following in Bangladesh’s The New Nation:
Barack Obama has so far achieved remarkable progress towards establishing peace through his bold initiatives to get the earth free of nuclear threat and religion-based hostility. I strongly feel that the winning of the Nobel Peace Prize 2009 by US President Obama is a triumph of peace over war, hatred, and conflicts.
Prof. Haque’s editorial is important for a number of reasons. As a prominent scholar working on key issues of economics in a Muslim country of 159 million people, his assessment of Obama’s achievements to date suggests significant substantive gains have been made in fostering better relations with the Muslim world, and specifically in terms of showing leadership on issues like global climate destabilization and water scarcity, which are so critical to a predominantly poor, low-lying coastal-farming nation like Bangladesh.
In one of the most probing, thoughtful and historically aware, responses to the Nobel award, Greg Beals explained the following, in the Root:
When Alfred Nobel, a Swedish arms manufacturer and inventor of dynamite, bequeathed his considerable estate to establish, among other things, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1895, it was established for “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” According to the rules, the prize is awarded, not for lifelong achievement, but to the one who has done the most to create an atmosphere of peace and reconciliation over the past year.
Like Martin Luther King Jr., you don’t have to wait a lifetime to win. King was the youngest person ever to win the prize in 1964, the year after his “I Have a Dream,” speech. At that time, the peace associated with the civil rights movement was far from being achieved. The committee could have easily argued that King needed more experience. If they had done so, he would likely have won the award posthumously.
It’s important to remember that the Nobel Peace Prize is not awarded solely for ending conflicts or for “achievement” at all, but rather for consistently championing the interests of humanity and democracy, for inspiring human beings to be more thoughtful about the civic ethics of their choices and their allegiances.
Were Obama to have been awarded the prize solely for his meteoric rise through the American political system, on a vibrant message of hope, principle and a return to core values of fairness, the rule of law, human rights and international peace and cooperation, the achievement would be big enough. But the meaning of the award has much more to do with his very real and very significant re-opening of America’s commitment to the international system that favors peace and cooperation, not just in principle but in practice.
Beals continues as follows:
So what hope did the committee glean from Obama over the past year? They rightly saw more movement on the Iran nuclear issue through dialogue than there has been achieved over the past eight years of the Bush administration. They saw U.S.-led efforts to strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty—something that Nobel Prize winner Mohamed El Baradei noted when he said that Obama “has done in nine months what many people would take a generation to do.”
They listened to an administration that has pledged to close down Guantanamo and leave Iraq. They noticed that for the first time since Jimmy Carter, American political discourse has focused on accountability of governments and human rights—Hillary Clinton’s recent condemnation of the murder and rape of opposition demonstrators in Guinea being but an example. For the first time in more than eight years, we have an administration that is willing to listen to the Middle East and willing to tackle the challenges associated with that elusive peace process.
Not one of these points is a minor achievement: it takes great moral courage and coherence of conscience to make complex arguments that favor peace and cooperation, when simplistic distortions and the vocabulary of cynicism and violence cover so much ground, politically. It takes the kind of commitment to peace and justice the Nobel Peace Prize was designed to reward and promote.
Yesterday, this publication’s founder and editorial director, J.E. Robertson, reported:
His work on nuclear disarmament is “important” not because it’s about non-proliferation, but because it’s about disarmament. Total, 100%, global nuclear disarmament. And he now has the unanimous support of the world’s major nuclear powers, the 5 permanent members of the Security Council, to move toward that goal.
UN SC Res. 1887 is one of the most important documents ever produced by the UN system, in that it lays the groundwork for a world free of nuclear weapons, however long it may take to achieve that goal. In the entire history of the nuclear arms race, no one has achieved that level of consensus on disarmament. This was done by aggressive, forthright and successful diplomacy, in the span of just 8 months’ worth of work. That is a major accomplishment.
Robertson went on to note that:
What Pres. Obama has done in terms of fostering international cooperation and peace, in just 8 months, far outweighs anything that was done in the last 8 years —when radical rhetoric, threats and intransigence, were hallmarks of national foreign policy—, and we all know that. The award is intended to acknowledge outstanding efforts to spur fraternity among nations, reduce or eliminate standing armies and achieve peace through open talks.
It’s time to take a cue from the Nobel committee and give credit where credit is due. We need more of this persistent, aggressive, collaborative diplomacy, aimed at restoring dignity to those mired in the world’s forgotten crises and promoting democracy and cooperation in concrete ways. The security of the United States depends on it, the stability of nations requires it, and any consideration for the wellbeing of future generations demands it.
Can we fault Pres. Barack Obama for the fact that the world’s many desperate crises remain unresolved? I think that would be a mistake. It’s not any one individual’s responsibility to resolve all the struggles happening everywhere in the world, nor should it be, if we are to be a sane, democratic global civilization. But we can demand the highest standards of moral character and humanitarian principle, and we can reward those who give signs of commitment to them.
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