Friday, October 9, 2009

International (B)Onus

Very fascinating news coming out of Oslo today. President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Committee citing that "[h]is 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."

Awarding the Prize to a sitting head of government is not unprecedented. Mikhail Gorbachev won the Prize in 1990 for his work to open up the Soviet Union. It seems that the Committee again is attempting to promote a leader and their work, and using the awarding of the Prize to increase that leader's international and moral authority.

Obama is the third sitting U.S. president to receive the Prize. Woodrow Wilson was awarded the Prize in 1919, and Theodore Roosevelt received his Prize in 1906. And now a major onus lies on the shoulders of Barack Obama.

The Nobel Peace Prize is ostensibly the world's highest honor. Wilson received his Prize for his Fourteen Points, a framework for peace negotiations in the post-World War I world. Although those Points might be seen as a failure due to World War II, many of its expectations and ideas still hold major relevance today. Roosevelt's Prize was given for his role in the Treaty of Portsmouth, bringing an end to the Russo-Japanese War.

Many will say/have said that the President has not earned the Prize, because he has not done anything. I have a tendency to partially agree with them. We are still in Afghanistan and Iraq, although our forces in that country are slowly winding down (but there are 14 bases under construction there for our use). Iran still has attention on it for its nuclear program issues, and of course there's the perennial problem of Israel and Palestine. Not to mention the continued existance of al-Qaida and other radical fundamentalist Islamic terrorists.

The Committee also believed that President Obama's work on non-proliferation was a key cause for their decision. It is on this issue that Obama has his greatest opportunity to really earn his Nobel. Nuclear weapons are a terribly destabilizing weapon, and non-proliferation has long been seen as a key strategy to preventing a global catastrophe. When France got the bomb, China accelerated its development program. When China got the bomb, India worked harded to get theirs. Then Pakistan did. Generally, nations that feel threatened by nearby nuclear weapons will seek to obtain weapons of their own.

If Iran successfully develops nuclear weapons, I predict that it will only be a matter of time before the Iraqi government desires their own program. Turkey will continue to amass its stockpile from NATO (if not develop their own weapons), and Israel most certainly will increase their own nuclear resources, if not conduct an outright pre-emptive strike against Iranian facilities. If North Korea continues to develop its weapons program, then soon South Korea will want nuclear weapons, and perhaps even Japan will turn towards a weapon that had wreaked so much death and destruction on them almost 65 years ago. With more nuclear weapons about, the possiblity of war dramatically increases, not to mention the risk of terrorists obtaining a stray warhead. That's a real nightmare scenario.

Iraq and Afghanistan are important, no doubt. But President Obama, if he is to really earn the world's greatest honor, must make non-proliferation his primary foreign policy objective in this term. We know how to handle Iraq and Afghanistan and terrorists; that is a military job, and really does not demand a whole lot from Obama (that's why there's the DOD and the Chiefs of Staff, and the SecDef). But the president should follow through on his campaign statement and talk face-to-face with leaders attempting to develop nuclear weapons. I hope that the Prize will help him in this task. If he is successful, then we might be able to say that Obama more than met the expectations of Wilson and Roosevelt.

Oh, and the $1.4 million prize? Either donate it to charity, or use it in the efforts for health care reform.

1 comment:

BMac said...

"Iraq and Afghanistan are important, no doubt. But President Obama, if he is to really earn the world's greatest honor, must make non-proliferation his primary foreign policy objective in this term. We know how to handle Iraq and Afghanistan and terrorists; that is a military job, and really does not demand a whole lot from Obama (that's why there's the DOD and the Chiefs of Staff, and the SecDef)."

I understand your reasoning, but it's up to the President to decide how many forces to add and to persuade Congress to accept the resulting budget request.

If Obama refuses McChrystal's request and the war in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate, Obama is screwed. In contrast, nuclear nonproliferation is a relatively low-visibility issue (barring some unforeseen event like an Iranian test or perhaps a terrorist WMD attack). The President is already trying to accomplish so much-- politically, I think it'd be safest for him to focus on the biggest potential liabilities.

Also, I think it was a mistake for him to even accept the award in the first place. It put the question "wait, what has he accomplished?" in the minds of swing-voters before he was ready to answer it.