Obama, Nobel of the Just War

President of war he is and will remain. Barack Obama was not afraid to take the paradox to the extreme yesterday in Oslo in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. “We are at war,” he acknowledged from the outset, before launching into a long reminder, philosophical and historical, of the reasons for war. “War appeared with the first man,” he underlined. It is sometimes “not only necessary but morally justified,” he followed, citing the examples of World War II, the Korean War and the War in the Balkans. Vietnam, however, was not invoked.

“Farce.” All the while proclaiming himself the heir of Martin Luther King, whose 1964 Nobel Prize acceptance speech he reread to prepare himself, Obama emphasized that the rejection of violence advocated by Martin Luther King could not be his only guide as president of the United States. What is more, Obama used this platform to alert the world that America’s Army operations are not ready to be ended. Throughout the speech, he evoked several countries – such as Somalia, Sudan, Congo and Burma – which could merit armed intervention. In these last three countries, “There must be consequences” for the way that local governments “brutalize their own people,” he warned.

The Nobel Committee, it is true, was looking for trouble by awarding this year’s prize to a president barely in office, who has not had time to do anything concrete for peace, but who, on the contrary, just announced military reinforcements in Afghanistan. In the United States, only 26 percent of voters deem this Nobel Prize deserved, according to a Quinnipiac University poll published this week. The Nobel Committee got away with a farce “a la Orwell,” complain the pacifists, who feel this prize and this speech illustrate the “double thought” described by George Orwell in 1984. One of the Party’s slogans in Orwell’s novel was a premonition: “War is peace.”

This speech marks an important “change,” said neoconservative Robert Kagan yesterday, feeling very pleased. “We are witnessing a substantial shift, back in the direction of a more muscular moralism, a la Truman or Reagan. The emphasis on military power, war for just causes, and moral principles recalls Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase, ‘the just man armed.’ There is something much more quintessentially American and traditional about this speech compared to most of his rhetorical approach throughout the year,” suggests Kagan. Obama “could sell shoes to a snake,” joked analyst Walter Russell Mead. This speech “was a carefully reasoned defense of a foreign policy that differs very little from George W. Bush’s […] If Bush had said these things, the world would be filled with violent denunciations. When Obama says them, people purr.”

“Evolution.” If he acknowledged that others certainly deserved the award more than he, Obama committed himself all the same to making good use of it by working toward a “gradual evolution” of the human condition, as advocated by John F. Kennedy.

More concretely, the strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski suggests that Obama “seize the opportunity” of this Nobel in order to propose his own blueprint for peace in the Middle East. On this matter, “it feels like we’re moving backwards,” admitted Barack Obama yesterday in Oslo.

In Afghanistan, General Petraeus likewise warned this week that the next few months risk being even more violent than previous months, to the extent that American reinforcements will attack the “sanctuaries of the enemy.” These are some of the challenges that await the new award winner.