THE NOBEL HOPE PRIZE
OCTOBER 10, 2009
The Nobel Hope Prize
An award for the end of American exceptionalism.
The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to President Obama yesterday was greeted with astonishment as much as any other emotion, even among many of his admirers. Our own reaction is bemusement at the Norwegian decision to offer what amounts to the world’s first futures prize in diplomacy, with the Nobel Committee anticipating the heroic concessions that it believes Mr. Obama will make to secure treaties that will produce a new era of global serenity.
Maybe he really is The One.
Mr. Obama seemed more than a little amazed himself, after only nine months on the job and having been inaugurated only 12 days before Nobel nominations were due in February. The prize isn’t “a recognition of my own accomplishment,” the President said yesterday, adding that “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.” Humility grace note accepted.
Yet something more than the power of charisma induced the Norwegians to honor Mr. Obama, so this is also a teachable moment. The committee’s citation provides a crib sheet. The Norwegians hailed “Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons,” noting “a new climate” in which “multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position.”
The statement extols the American’s support for the U.N. and notes that “dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts.” Praise comes as well for Mr. Obama’s commitment to fight climate change by capping greenhouse gas emissions. George W. Bush may have retired from American public life, but the Europeans want the Yanks to know they never want to see his likes again. Counting Jimmy Carter in 2002 and Al Gore in 2007, this is the third Nobel Non-Bush Peace Prize.
On one level, all of this represents the parochial European foreign policy agenda. But somehow we doubt Mr. Obama would have received the Nobel merely for believing in climate change. The Norwegians rightly detect something larger in Mr. Obama’s vision. As Thorbjørn Jagland, who chairs the Nobel Committee, told CNN: “He has done a lot already” and this award will “enhance the ideals Barack Obama is promoting.”
What ideals are those? Well, the Nobel citation declares that Mr. Obama’s “diplomacy is founded in 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.” Now, the world is a big place, much of it run by despots and crooks, each of whom gets the same vote in the U.N. General Assembly as America. The Europeans are applauding that at long last there is an American President willing to let himself and his country mingle as equals with this amorphous global “majority.”
The Norwegians are on to something. In a mere nine months, the President has promulgated a vision for the U.S. role in the world that breaks with both Republican and Democratic predecessors. Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, called America the “indispensable nation” a decade ago. Ronald Reagan called it a “city on the Hill,” an example to the world.
Mr. Obama sees the U.S. differently, as weaker than it was and the rest of the planet as stronger, and so he calls for a humbler America, at best a first among equals, working primarily through the U.N. The world’s challenges, he emphasized yesterday, “can’t be met by any one leader or any one nation.” What this suggests to us—and to the Norwegians—is the end of what has been called “American exceptionalism.” This is the view that U.S. values have universal application and should be promoted without apology, and defended with military force when necessary.
Put in this context, we wonder if most Americans will count this peace-of-the-future prize as a compliment. Appearing at the Rose Garden yesterday, Mr. Obama seemed to have noticed what the Norwegians have noticed about him, as he was at pains to spin his award for Americans. For once, he refrained from making his habitual remark about having restored America’s standing in the world, or apologizing for some U.S. transgression. Instead he wrapped the Nobel in the U.S. flag “as an affirmation of American leadership” and concluded that, “I believe America will continue to lead.”
We all have at least three more years to learn if Mr. Obama will fulfill the audacity of hope that the Nobel Committee has put on him to bow to the values of the world’s “majority.”
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A14
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703746604574463142879190358.html#
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