The Nobel Committee has been somewhat rattled by the reaction to their recent award, and has for a second time publically explained why President Obama deserved the peace prize. From the Politico:
Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee defended their decision to award this year's Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama. Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland told AP, "We simply disagree that he has done nothing. He got the prize for what he has done."
Jagland cited Obama's outreach to the Muslim world and the way the president "modified" a Bush-era proposal for an anti-missile shield in Europe as two key accomplishments.
That's two items. The first part continues a pattern that is well-established in the short history of this Administration: a confusion of sentiment with action. I have noted that, in his speech before the U.N., the President himself presented his decision to close the Guantánamo Bay prison as one of his achievements. I noted that the New York Times repeated his language in their defense of the President.
I also noted that the President had done no more than state a decision to close it. He has not in fact closed it, nor is there any indication yet of a coherent plan to close it. Maybe one will eventually materialize, but in the meantime a pious intention does not count as an achievement. To state boldly that it does, as the President and the Times both did, confuses mere words with deeds.
Something of the same is true of the President's "outreach to the Muslim world." To be sure, the President is talking nice. Perhaps his rhetoric is different from that of the previous Administration, and perhaps the fact that he is saying it, and not Bush, means a lot more. But granting that, has the President really proposed anything concrete that has promise of bring the two worlds together? It is difficult to see any real movement on any actual issue. Like the Times, the Nobel Committee can't seem to see the difference between pious words and effective actions.
By contrast, the President's decision to abandon our promise to include Poland and the Czech Republic under NATO's anti-missile defenses was a real deed. It effectively undermined the confidence of these central European nations that they are really part of NATO. See Ms. Flint's post on this topic. Does that advance the cause of world peace?
Well, it might have, conceivably, if it had resulted in a change in Russian policy toward Iran. The Russians have been one of two big obstacles to effective international sanctions against Iran (the other being China). If the Russians had come around, that would have been at least some substantial progress on dissuading Iran from its nuclear ambitions.
Well, now we know how that is working out. From the New York Times:
Denting President Obama's hopes for a powerful ally in his campaign to press Iran on its nuclear program, Russia's foreign minister [Sergey V. Lavrov] said Tuesday that threatening Tehran now with harsh new sanctions would be "counterproductive."…
Mr. Lavrov's resistance was striking given that, just three weeks before, President Dmitri A. Medvedev said that "in some cases, sanctions are inevitable." American officials had hailed that statement as a sign that Russia was finally coming around to the Obama administration's view that Iran is best handled with diplomacy backed by a credible threat of sanctions.
Now those two paragraphs alone tell the story of a foreign policy failure. The President left two young democracies feeling as though they had been betrayed and sold to the Russians. From Yahoo News:
"Betrayal! The U.S. sold us to Russia and stabbed us in the back," the Polish tabloid Fakt declared on its front page.
It is clear that the Administration what it thought it was getting out of this sale. Of course, Nobel prizes are not given for advancing national interests. But did giving the Russians the gift of more leverage over Central Europe advance the cause of world peace? Did the failure to move the world toward real pressures against a nuclear Iran really earn our President a Peace Prize? That the Nobel Committee thinks so is a sign of moral rot.
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