Allan Lichtman

After being awakened at 6:00 am, my first reaction to the news that President Obama has received the Nobel Peace Prize was that it must be compensation for his failure to bring the Olympics to Chicago.

My second reaction was that the prize, much like the award to former President Jimmy Carter, was another international slap in the face to George W. Bush. In part, Obama won the prize because he won the election.

More seriously, the Obama award represented one of the two traditions of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The first tradition is to award the prize for settled accomplishment. When Theodore Roosevelt became the first sitting American president to win the Nobel Peace Prize, he had already mediated the settlement of the Russo-Japanese War. When Nelson Mandela won the prize in 1993, he had already led the fight to end apartheid in South Africa and establish a democratic government.

However, the Committee awards a second kind of prize in part to encourage leadership of an ongoing process. The Committee awarded the 1994 prize to Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzchak Rabin while they were in the midst of negotiating a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Although Woodrow Wilson had achieved much at the time of his Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, the Committee made the award in part to encourage settlement of the postwar peace according to the idealism of Wilson’s 14 Points. In accepting his award, Wilson said, “I am moved by the recognition of my sincere and earnest efforts in the cause of peace, but also by the very poignant humility before the vastness of the work still called for by this cause.” Of course, the postwar peace settlements were far from reflecting fully Wilson’s ideals.

The Obama prize is not readily comparable to the Nobel Peace prizes won by Roosevelt and Wilson – the only other sitting American presidents to the win the award. They were in the sixth or seventh years of two-term presidencies. Obama has not yet completed one year.

Still, Obama has brought new hope and optimism to peoples across the world by shifting to a more diplomatic and multilateral approach to foreign relations. He has canceled misguided plans to put defensive missiles into Central Europe, improved U. S. – Russian relations, and struck an important deal with Iran on the processing of nuclear fuel. He has launched a significant initiative on controlling nuclear weapons and improved America’s fidelity to the rule of law.

There are those of us who hope that the Nobel Peace Prize will discourage Obama from escalating the war in Afghanistan. However, he is likely to make his decisions on other grounds.