Moving beyond the “with-us-or-against-us” notion of the world counts for something. That’s the message from the Nobel Prize Committee, who today announced that the Nobel Peace Prize would be awarded to President Barack Obama. Obama’s simple efforts at engagement, in contrast to the outright rebuke at the idea by his predecessor, have been enough to make him seem like a true peacenik.
Back home in the states however, some people question whether Obama really deserves the award, and in coherence with the super-partisan political climate that America faces, those questioners have been conservatives who care less about peace or the Nobel Prize than about bashing the President for everything that he does.
That’s why it almost pain’s me to say this, but the critics are right. That prize shouldn’t go to Obama.
The most telling criticism came from Erick Erikson at the Red State Blog:
So in less than two weeks of entering office, Obama did something to qualify. What was it? Not closing Gitmo? Continuing the Bush administration’s policies in the War on Terror but no longer using the name? Or pronouncing a policy of abject American capitulation to our enemies?
Mr. Erikson first two points illustrate why the President shouldn’t have won, but the last illustrates why he did. Let me explain.
First, although Obama has tried to engage the world, he has in fact been a bit Bush-like on the policies mentioned above. Air raids continue in Pakistan, Guantanamo Bay remains open (though this is largely the fault of Congress, who rejected allowing terrorism suspects to enter the U.S. even to be tried), and in a lesser known example, the U.S. recently signed a military base agreement with Colombia that will expand the American military presence there.
I’m surprised it was a conservative, not a peace advocate, who brought up these points. But whether or not you agree with the mentioned policies, it’s clear they don’t really fall in the President’s favor as a sign of his peacefulness.
It seems the President didn’t earn this award through achievement, rather, he won it by comparison. Erikson’s last point, that the President is “pronouncing a policy of abject American capitulation to our enemies,” illustrates this fact. Erikson, like many on the right (including Bush, Cheney and Co.), see America’s interests as inherently opposed to those of the rest of the world. The conventional wisdom for these folks is that the common good is no good for America. But that’s a dangerous train of though; The notion that efforts at cooperation amount to “capitulation to our enemies,” contributes to a regenerative cycle of violence and distrust. In a world full of complex multi-dimensional challenges like nonproliferation, terrorism, climate change, and poverty, that conventional wisdom will get us, as a global society, nowhere.
So I suppose that given his position, Obama’s acceptence that America should be a team player, not a unilateral warmonger, is worth a lot. Is it worth a Nobel Peace Prize? Probably not. The President’s humble response to the news suggests he understands that the fruit of his efforts have been limited. Let’s hope this will induce him to get serious about peace and earn this award over the course of his presidency.
