FTdotcomment

So nine months in and Barack Obama has already won the Nobel Peace Prize. Extraordinary. It appears to be an award primarily for not being George W. Bush, since Obama’s entire achievement so far is, um, to reverse Bush’s American unilateralism. This is done in the hope – stress, *hope* – that it leads to something positive in world politics. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a bad thing; but it won’t be Peace Prize-worthy until he has made it work. The Nobel committee said:

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.

Benedict Brogan at the Telegraph urges Obama to turn it down, on the basis that he is the “barely man” of world politics:

What this does is accelerate the elevation of President Obama to a comedy confection, which he does not deserve, and gives his critics yet another bat to whack him with. Shame on the Swedes. He should turn it down, even if he does look great in white tie and tails.

The Peace Prize doesn’t have a glorious history, as the FT’s Gideon Rachman pointed out yesterday. Henry Kissinger, who – amazingly – won when he tried to end the Vietnam war. His upsumming of the prize gets it about right for Obama: “More than the achievement of peace, it symbolises the quest for peace.”

We can only keep our fingers crossed that Obama doesn’t follow in the footsteps of Kissinger, who failed entirely in his attempt to end Vietnam, and went on to bomb Cambodia and Laos so heavily that they still haven’t recovered. Later winners also seem to have won on the basis of the committee hoping against hope that they can manage something: Yassir Arafat and Shimon Peres, particularly. Gideon has a handy guide to the awful things that happened after other peace prizes were awarded.