Costs of War: Peace Prize Politics
By Shaun Waterman for ISN
From the domino theorists of the Cold War through the liberal interventionism of the Clinton administration and on to the neo-conservative determination that freedom could be spread by US firepower, American foreign policy thinkers have often sought to make peace by waging war.
In some important ways, this is also true of US President Barack Obama. After all, the day the Nobel Peace Prize was announced, the president spent much of the afternoon closeted with national security advisors, wrestling with the question of whether to commit an additional 40,000 US combat troops to Afghanistan.
So it should perhaps be no surprise that the Nobel Committee’s decision is such a mixed blessing for Obama, despite the extraordinary vote of confidence in his leadership it represents.
“Only very rarely,” wrote the committee, “has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future.” The committee said his diplomacy was “founded on the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.”
Many US commentators interpreted the award as a “external pagedown payment” on peace agreements yet to be reached. The external pagepresident himself depicted it as part of a tradition of using the prize “to give momentum to a set of causes.”
And, on one reading, the Committee’s citation does portray it that way. After all, it external pagelists the achievements it is rewarding as the president’s return to the principles of multilateralism, his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, and his leadership on the issue of global warming - hardly a set of concrete, fully realized successes.
The president’s external pageprogressive supporters say the prize is a measure of the way Obama has “restored America’s moral standing” in the world, pointing out it was welcomed by former winners as diverse as Mikhail Gorbachev, Desmond Tutu and Shimon Peres.
‘Anti-American’ poison
But there is a current in American politics to which the approbation of foreigners, especially liberal internationalists like the Nobel Committee, is poison. In this twisted and sometimes bitter version of US exceptionalism, the international community is a myth cooked up by America-haters to keep the country down.
Radio talk show host external pageRush Limbaugh accused the Nobel Committee of telling Obama, “Look, we love what you're doing, you are destroying your country as a superpower. Keep it up, bud!
“He's basically emasculating this country, and they applauded today with this award,” concluded Limbaugh.
And these sentiments are echoed - in more polite terms - by the Republican mainstream. Neo-conservative commentator external pageBill Kristol told Fox News that Obama should have declined the award. "This is an anti-American committee," he said. "It's not clear to me it speaks for the world. It speaks for five Norwegians."
Comparative popularity
But the evidence suggests otherwise. Obama is popular with people all over the world, especially by comparison with his predecessor.
A external pageJune opinion poll of 13,000 people in 12 countries sponsored by the prestigious German Marshall Fund found more than three-quarters (77 percent) of respondents in the EU and Turkey supported Obama’s handling of international affairs, compared to less than one-fifth (19 percent) who had approved of President George W Bush’s foreign policy last year.
It’s important to not to overstate this. Europe is not exactly hungering for US global leadership. Although 71 percent agreed that Europe and the US have enough common values to be able cooperate on international problems - up from just 58 percent last year - only a narrow majority (55 percent) felt that strong US leadership in the world was desirable. Last year, a very slightly larger majority (57 percent), felt that such leadership was undesirable.
Nonetheless, the evidence appears compelling: foreigners by and large want to like America, and they find it a hell of a lot easier to do so under President Obama.
Political millstone?
But so influential on American political discourse are the extraordinary views of Kristol and others - in effect, that if the rest of the world is lauding Obama, he must be bad for America - that most US pundits now appear see the prize as a political millstone for the White House.
Media critic Howard Kurtz, never one to stray far from the narrow path of Washington’s conventional wisdom, external pagetweeted after interviewing a senior White House official, “Fascinating that [the] Nobel [prize] has become this negative they've got to combat.”
Political historian external pageRonald Krebs wrote that Obama ought to be worried about “how the Nobel will reverberate at home.
“To the growing number of Americans less pleased with Obama, the award is a warning sign” that he shares the alien values of an internationalist elite, argued Krebs. “For Obama's defenders, the peace prize confirms their faith. For his detractors, it stokes their fear.”
Even Bob Schieffer, doyen of a passing generation of Washington political reporters who actually value civility in political discourse, took the president to task in no uncertain terms in a brief commentary on his CBS Sunday talk show external pageFace The Nation.
“An undeserved accolade has a high probability of backfire,” he warned.
“For the record,” Schieffer continued, “I generally agree with the president’s approach on foreign policy, but the Nobel Committee did him no favors by giving him the award before he had anything to show for his efforts.”
There is no doubt that the award has heightened, as well as highlighted, already soaring expectations for the new administration among the peoples of Europe and other allies. As a result, there is a risk it may have set the president up to fail.
If Obama takes his general’s advice and boosts US troop numbers in Afghanistan, and the war drags on; if talks with Iran produce too little progress and, feeling hemmed in by an upcoming re-election bid, he starts talking tough; if domestic political constraints hamstring his leadership on global warming … there are any number of policy developments that could threaten the president’s honeymoon with global public opinion.
Conventional wisdom in Washington seems to be that Obama needs to respond to the prize by flexing his global muscle for a domestic political audience. “The president may feel compelled to buck the international community on some salient issue just to show that he is more loyal to American interests than to any cosmopolitan dream,” suggests Krebs.
“Rather than release his inner dove, the Nobel Peace Prize may force him to brandish his public hawk,” he concludes.
But this would be a huge miscalculation. Obama won last year’s election against John McCain in large part because he represented a break from precisely the view of America’s place in the world enunciated by Kristol (a very senior advisor to McCain).
The number of Americans who are already convinced of this new world view is - like the hardened advocates of Kristol’s “they hate us because we’re free” exceptionalism -- still at this point a minority. But that is what political leadership is all about. Obama needs to prove, to Americans as much as anyone else, that he is worthy of the prize.