The Associated Press reports that the Nobel Prize Committee is starting to wonder about their choice for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama.
He is the erstwhile anti-war candidate, now engaged in more theaters of war than his predecessor. He is the commander-in-chief who pulled more than a hundred thousand U.S. troops out of harm’s way in Iraq, but also began a slow trickle back in. He recoiled against full-scale, conventional war, while embracing the brave new world of drone attacks. He has championed diplomacy on climate change, nuclear proliferation and has torn down walls to Cuba and Myanmar, but failed repeatedly to broker a lasting pause to more than six years of slaughter in Syria.
If there was consensus Obama had not yet earned his Nobel Peace Prize when he received it in 2009, there’s little such agreement on whether he deserves it today.
“I don’t think he would have been in the speculation of the Nobel committee now, in 2016, even if he had not already won,” said Kristian Berg Harpviken, director of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, and a close watcher of the Nobel committee. Harpviken said he views Obama’s foreign policy as more conventional and limited than he expected, particularly regarding his use of multilateral cooperation and institutions.
Yeah, it’s not often you see a Nobel Peace Prize winner with a secret “kill list,” commanding automated killing machines that strike without warning from the sky.
I’ll let Jay Nordlinger, the real expert on the Nobel Peace Prize around here, offer a fuller assessment, but this seems to me to be one of the more thorough beclownings of the committee in recent memory. Obama had been president for a whole two weeks when the nominations were closed for that year. It was a rare Peace Prize given for “potential,” instead of an actual accomplishment in attempting to secure peace.
You don’t give the Most Valuable Player award to a rookie before the season starts.
The AP also notes some grim truths about the state of the world:
By some sobering measures, the case for Obama the peacemaker is difficult to make. Analysts who track conflict, refugee populations, terrorist attacks and political upheaval say the world has only become less peaceful during Obama’s tenure, a trend that began just before he took office.
Instances of terrorism have peaked, deaths in battle around the world are at a 25-year high, and the number of refugees and displaced people has reached a level not seen in sixty years, according to the 2016 Global Peace Index, a report on international stability produced by the nonpartisan think-tank the Institute for Economic and Peace. The researchers attributed the trends to the expanded warfare in the Middle East and North Africa and broad ripples across the region and in Europe.
That’s not all Obama’s fault. But those bloody figures also erase his argument that he’s leaving the world in better shape than how it was when he took office.