Obama deserves the Nobel: He has changed the international game

[Guest guest]

Obama deserves the Nobel: He has changed the international game

REUTERS

 

On issues that matter – a nuclear-free world, an end to dangerous rogue states –

the path is no longer blocked, and all the world's major powers act and vote

together

 

Doug Saunders

 

London — From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Published on Friday, Oct. 09, 2009 9:10PM EDT

 

Last updated on Friday, Oct. 09, 2009 10:16PM EDT

 

 

A young politician, not yet fully tested, makes important and history-altering

moves on the international stage – moves whose long-term outcomes remain

uncertain – and is surprised to find himself with a Nobel Peace Prize.

 

That describes Lester B. Pearson in 1957. It describes Barack Obama in 2009.

 

Mr. Pearson's role in creating a United Nations peacekeeping force to resolve

the first Middle East conflict won him the award six years before he was prime

minister. It didn't change attitudes among Arabs or Israelis, but the Norwegian

judges felt it was a symbolically important action that had a good chance of

creating lasting peace in the Middle East.

 

Mr. Obama's leadership in uniting all the world's powers around total nuclear

disarmament, his ending the impasse between Russia and the West and his

goal-driven engagement with Iran and the wider Muslim world have not yet borne

fruit, but the Norwegian judges believe the nature of the world has been

significantly altered for the better.

 

The Nobel Peace Prize is not a lifetime-achievement award. It tends to honour

actions that change the way the world functions, the way countries engage or

publics think about a conflict. They should be important, historic actions, but

the prize does not wait for results.

 

Mr. Obama falls squarely into this tradition: He has changed the game.

International relations no longer function the way they have for the past

decade, and important new possibilities are now open. On the issues that matter

– a nuclear-free world, an end to dangerous rogue states – the path is no longer

blocked, and all the world's major powers act and vote together.

 

The words " Obama agenda " make many of us think of a bogged-down and increasingly

horrific conflict in Afghanistan, an unrelenting standoff between Israel and

Arabs half a century after Mr. Pearson got involved, and a Guantanamo Bay prison

that determinedly stays open.

 

These are significant issues, and they hang pointedly over Mr. Obama's young

administration. They happen to be the geographically limited but symbolically

loaded conflicts that obsess North Americans.

 

The Nobel Peace Prize is a European prize. The world outside North America sees

Afghanistan, Israel and the embers of the Iraq conflict amid a far wider array

of threats and worries. There are larger issues at stake. Some of them involve

the fate of the world.

 

Mr. Obama's decision to cancel the U.S. missile-defence system in Poland and the

Czech Republic, and thus to end a simmering conflict with Russia and make

nuclear disarmament possible, was an enormous development to Europeans.

 

His leadership of a UN Security Council summit that called for total nuclear

disarmament – unanimously, for the first time – and launched a strengthened

nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, just before sitting down with Iran, was

probably the headline of the year outside North America.

 

His Cairo speech opening dialogue with the Middle East and putting international

relations back on political and economic terms – ending the " clash of

civilizations " and " axis of evil " confrontation of previous years – was received

as a historic epiphany in much of the world.

 

His talks with Iran, with Russia's and Europe's help, and his recognition that

Iran is a long-term problem rather than an immediate threat, have signalled a

new recognition that change can be made to happen, as it was in 1989, by playing

a long game built on shared values. That, for the rest of the world, was a big

deal.

 

It could be dismissed as mere talk. But it is precisely the sort of initiative

that has defined the Nobel Peace Prize, and that has led it to honour, with a

few embarrassing exceptions, the great developments of our age.

 

When West German Chancellor Willy Brandt won it in 1971, his policy of

" ostpolitik " – engaging and aiding the communist east, rather than confronting

and isolating it – seemed pointless and foolhardy to many. It was not yet

evident that it would make the events of 1989 into velvet revolutions rather

than violent ones.

 

Lech Walesa won it in 1983. At that point he was a union leader whose

confrontations with communism seemed quixotic and tragic. It was not at all

clear that they would precipitate the fall of the Iron Curtain.

 

Mikhail Gorbachev won it in 1990, for his efforts on nuclear disarmament,

including his negotiation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and

for replacing international confrontation with negotiations.

 

At that, he was a leader who had escalated and then lost a bloody Afghanistan

war he had inherited, whose country was the world's leading arms dealer, and who

had made reforms designed to keep communism intact. It wasn't clear then that

they would bring about the end of the Soviet Union.

 

Half a dozen people and organizations have won the Peace Prize for initiatives

that have helped the cause of nuclear disarmament without actually reducing arms

counts.

 

The Nobel Peace Prize is also a political prize. Its judges are not neutral,

scientific arbiters of accomplishment; they are instructed to encourage

international co-operation, arms reduction and acts of engagement.

 

Among people who follow politics without national interest, Mr. Obama's

diplomacy has been far more significant than anything else in the world this

year.

 

" For people working on nuclear disarmament, this prize is overwhelmingly

important, in particular because Obama has taken the most important steps in his

few months in office, and because we view it as an endorsement of the urgency of

this mission, " said William Hartung, director of the New York based Arms and

Security Initiative and a leading arms-control authority.

 

Peace is never easy to define, especially in the middle of the action.

 

A local, unambiguous ending of a single conflict is easy to identify: Nelson

Mandela and F.W. De Klerk were easy to honour for ending apartheid, and John

Hume and David Trimble for ending the conflict in Northern Ireland, although

that conflict didn't end until 10 years after their prize.

 

But the head of a powerful nation who plays the three-dimensional chess of

global change – that is a gamble. The prize could help Mr. Obama's cause or it

could dash his hopes on the rocky shoals of xenophobic domestic politics.

 

This is what peace looks like in the real world: Messy, ambiguous,

contradictory, troubled. In other words, it looks like Barack Obama.

 

 

 

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Re: Proud to be American once again (i hope Obama is the black JFK)

 

Proud to be American once again

 

MARGARET WENTE

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

 

E-mail Margaret Wente | Read Bio | Latest Columns

November 3, 2008 at 11:36 PM EST

 

I don't know what kind of president Barack Obama will be, but I know

this: He has made me proud of America again. And also of Americans.

 

Today, they are turning out in record numbers to repudiate the

leaders who disgraced and failed them. Today, they're doing what no

one would have dared imagine a few years ago: electing a biracial

president with a foreign-sounding name who self-identifies as black.

They are taking a courageous leap of faith, because they're disgusted

with what's happened to their country.

 

I am a Canadian who was born and grew up in the United States. For

most people like me, the past few years have been dreadful. We lost

our native country to men without honour. We lost it to people who

authorized torture, secret prisons and indefinite detention. We lost

it to people who made America hated and feared around the world and

then, for good measure, presided over a global financial collapse. We

gave up trying to defend America to all those critics who love to

wallow in its wickedness - because, for once, they were right, and we

were ashamed.

 

I don't know how Mr. Obama will do as president, but I know this: He

will give Americans their country back. He will work to make it the

kind of country that people can respect again.

 

I come from a long line of corn-fed Midwesterners, Republicans,

mostly. They were an optimistic lot, and they were immensely proud of

their country. From the time I was little, I, too, knew that my

country stood for freedom, justice and doing the right thing.

 

That idealized nation never did exist, of course. When Mr. Obama's

parents got married in Hawaii, it was still illegal for them to do so

in Virginia. Eventually, I learned that America wasn't always just,

and that quite a few Americans lived in a country quite different

from the one I knew. By the time I settled in Canada, I was relieved

to leave behind the race wars, the wounds of Vietnam and the operatic

hysteria of Watergate.

 

I've been a citizen of Canada for 30 years, and I never think of

going back. But it's been painful to see my native land turn into a

place that would dismay my grandparents. The moderate Rockefeller

Republicans of my youth were banished long ago, replaced by a gang of

moral absolutists who derive their certainty on both abortion and

foreign wars from divine revelation. They weren't conservatives at

all. They were radicals, who practised a sort of ideological slash

and burn. They created tribal divisions so bitter that, today,

Republicans and Democrats can scarcely talk to one another.

 

The optimism of my grandparents disappeared, too. Seven years after

9/11, America is still behaving like a nation under imminent threat -

defensive, inward-looking and overly afraid. There are smarter ways

to fight the terror wars, with less apocalyptic rhetoric, more

confidence and less pointless harassment of the public in airports.

Maybe Mr. Obama will find them.

 

I'm proud, too, proud and profoundly moved, that black Americans who

haven't bothered to vote in years are voting today. I see them and I

cry. The racial conversation will never end, but it will be

different. The bitter narrative of oppression and grievance is over.

The narrative of possibility - of Martin Luther King - can begin

again.

 

I'm under no illusion that Americans will start holding hands

tomorrow and sing Kumbaya. I have no idea whether Barack Obama will

be able to succeed, or even muddle through, with the nasty hand he's

been dealt. But I do know that what's happening today is a fresh

start, and a relief, and even redemptive.

 

" The cradle of the best and the worst. " That's what Leonard Cohen

sings about America and, as usual, he's absolutely right. So,

tonight, please join me in raising a glass to democracy in the United

States. Americans are about to get their country back, and so am I.

 

MARGARET WENTE

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail