The Poor Service Rendered to Obama

Does the Nobel Peace Prize need to be retired? This question is being posed after the prize was given today to Barack Obama. The decision, which oozes of the politically correct, is a wrongheadedly good idea.

True, this award, unlike the scientific or literature Nobels, does not reward the fruits of long research or a life’s work. As a rule, it is given to one or several key figures who contribute to rapprochement among people, to the spread of human rights and liberty.

Factors that apply to the new American president without a doubt. The man embodies rupture from the Bush era. His language is peaceable: towards the Muslims (Cairo speech) and in favor of nuclear disarmament (Prague speech). His political projects are marked with humanity: the reform of the United States health care system. His international ambitions cultivate reconciliation: in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Middle East. Finally, the man is the incarnation of the new America, the one that has at its head a black man, 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

But wasn’t it to the American people themselves that this title should be presented? They who dared to brave their past and present prejudices to elect a leader born of one of their minorities. They who sent a concrete, exemplary signal to the rest of the world. This doesn’t happen so often, even in the most advanced democracies.

Obama has good intentions, but is that enough to make a great president? Certainly not. He has only held this office for ten months. His route is long and full of pitfalls. Nothing is to say that he won’t be sent away at the end of his first term like one of his Democratic predecessors, Jimmy Carter, also a Nobel laureate. But he in 2002, 28 years after his retirement from the White House.

For his part, Obama is still serving. If this prize still has any value, it can only complicate his task, constrain his action, expose him to all forms of extortion. And what if the new Nobel laureate has to unravel the Iranian imbroglio by force? In politics, the end justifies the means. To win, high principles and big ideas must often accommodate a shameful cynicism and certain compromises in the wings.

The Nobel Academy, which awarded Arafat in 1994 but ignored Mahatma Gandhi, does not do Barack Obama any service today.