Opinion

Bam’s Nobel’s an act of ring-kissing, not reward for achievement

Leave it to a Polish electrician to short-circuit the global group-hug surrounding yesterday’s ridicu lous Nobel Peace Price announcement: “Who, Obama? So fast?”

But then, Nobel Laureate Lech Walesa had already shifted the course of world history when he won, by leading the movement that had already struck fear into the heart of the Soviet Empire — and would eventually help free Poland, Eastern Europe and Russia itself from Soviet rule.

You don’t have to dislike our handsome young president — and I, for one, don’t — to acknowledge that nominating him for the planet’s most prestigious peace award after he’d been on the job for only one month is like naming Derek Jeter MVP after spring training. It’s an act of pre-emptive encouragement, even ring-kissing — not a reward for achievement.

And it’s yet further proof that the European intellectual establishment, in laboring so hard to combat perceived American arrogance, reveals itself to be obsessed to the point of stalkerhood with the minutiae of American politics.

As more than one wag observed yesterday, the Nobel Committee has awarded three people in seven years for not being George W. Bush: Jimmy Carter in 2002, Al Gore in 2007, and now Obama. Can Bill Clinton be far off? Even Kofi Annan’s 2001 award could be seen as a thumb in the eye of a Republican foreign policy that has used the United Nations as a piñata.

Giving Americans trophies is a funny way of punishing us for being self-centered. Particularly when the accomplishment being rewarded is mere existence.

“Very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” the Nobel Committee explained. Very rarely has the pathos of the non-American West been on such rich display.

To his credit, the president acknowledged the absurdity of winning. “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize,” he said. “I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments.”

That didn’t stop his own political party from acting even more ridiculous than the genuflecting Europeans. Brad Woodhouse, communications director for the Democratic National Committee, slammed the GOP for not joining the standing ovation, thundering: “The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists — the Taliban and Hamas — this morning in criticizing the president for receiving the Nobel Peace prize.”

We don’t know yet whether Obama’s shifts in foreign policy — away from bravado and toward awkward silences, away from Iraq but into Afghanistan, away from free trade but toward Kyoto — will make the world a safer place. We do know that many of the promises that so animated his supporters, from closing down Guantanamo Bay to ending the practice of indefinite detention, have proven a bit trickier in practice.

But the mere fact of the award shows that one of his central foreign-policy goals may be the most difficult to pull off.

As Obama said yesterday morning, his administration seeks “a new era of engagement, in which all nations must take responsibility for the world we seek.”

Yet “taking responsibility” ultimately means guaranteeing their own security and fighting their own wars — and fixing their attention on world problems, instead of on the nation that disproportionately tries to address them. The first step down that long road lies not with America, but with the countries who love to love/hate us.

Surely, it will be a sign of responsibility and self-respect when the citadels of European respectability choose to lavish awards on those citizens of the world who actually accomplish great things — rather than on the American they think might do good someday. Sadly, judging from yesterday’s news, that day is still far, far away.

Matt Welch (matt.welch@reason.com) is Editor in Chief of Reason magazine.