Should we still take the Nobel Peace Prize seriously? Obama winning it was a bit of a stretch in my opinion, though the Pax Americana is a real thing.
The Peace prize is different, by nature it is always non-consensual, because there would be no reason to award a Peace Prize if there were not someone else who is waging a war, denying other people their basic rights or doing other Bad Things. Today it's the Taliban and the child exploiters who are the bad guys pointed out by the prize. Last year it was the Syrian dictatorship, in 2011 the Chinese government.
When Obama was given the Peace Prize, I was also shocked in disbelief, and like most people I think it was not deserved. But then I saw that some people in the US were not simply shacking their head, they were foaming with rage. Coincidentally, they were the same people who supported, and sometimes continued to justify the disastrous foreign policy of the previous administration. And that make me think this prize was actually well awarded. It was not deserved by Obama, and I think the Nobel committee, by giving him the prize at the beginning of his presidency before he could actually do anything for or against peace, was almost explicitly saying that they didn't care that he didn't deserved it. This prize was a middle finger to the Bush administration and I think that middle finger was well deserved.
The same goes for other polemical awards. Al Gore got it, and it made all the climate science deniers mad. Yasser Arafat got it and the Israeli political right got crazy.
It's not always like this (The Red Cross got the prize a number of times, and nobody disagrees with it), but often, if you don't understand why a Nobel Peace Prize is awarded, look at who it pisses off.
Libya was overthrown, Egypt was overthrown, and we've been making attempts in Syria and Ukraine. And after failing to gin up support against chemical weapons, we're now bombing Syria because of some crazy rebels that are allied with groups we support.
In the bigger picture, we are waging a crypto-war with between Russia over energy resources from Russia and the Gulf into Europe. Pope Francis recently had the courage to call it as such:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/13/us-pope-war-idUSKB...
So - to see Obama's peace prize as anything other than a partisan political joke (as you say, a "middle finger" to Bush) is a mistake.
Obama's administration has put the world as close to a hot-war between nuclear powers as we've seen in some time. It should make us angry - he was elected to stop the madness, and it seems like he is running business-as-usual.
It should make us angry, but not because he didn't fulfill his promise -- I think the public made a huge mistake taking a politician at his word. Rather, we ought to be angry for two reasons.
One, because he simply doesn't have the power to stop it. The machinery of the state, and the industry that keeps it propped up, have a momentum all their own.
Two, because he stood alone in the face of this madness. The Democrats could have reigned all this in in his first term, with investigations and criminal charges for the perpetrators, but they preferred to move on to other business, which it turns out is the same as the old business.
edit: and for what its worth, there was nothing Bush did that Obama didnt do ^2. more spying, more 'drone strikes', more meddling, more pushing countries into war. Kerry was a bit peeved when Syria actually abided to remove their chemical weapons.
You can even see the political undertones with the statement about India and Pakistan in the official announcement.
Also, I really don’t think Snowden should get a Peace Prize. It’s not like this opinion of yours that Snowden would be a worthy recipient is some kind of objective truth or even self-evident.
Snowden seems pretty subservient to Putin right now, and relies completely on him for his continued safety and asylum in Russia. He's in a pretty weak spot since Putin can dispense with him any time he wishes - either deport him or have him disappear, and the US won't raise a finger - but will keep him around as long as he's politically useful.
Those of us from pacifist religious traditions would disagree.
Also, one of the major incentives to maintain a strong defense is to keep from having to use it. Of course this principle, like anything else, can be taken too far.
Read his autobiography. He makes no apologies for the fact that he embraced guerrilla warfare, and actively waged war against the state. Initially, yes, he and the ANC adopted peaceful means, but when the South African state shutdown and outlawed all the peaceful means at their disposal (e.g. strikes, demonstrations, etc.), he supported, encouraged and actively participated in fighting against the State. Hell, he co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, after the Sharpville massacre. Even after his release from prison, he refused to disarm the ANC since the same apartheid state apparatus that he fought against still existed.
Mandela is undoubtedly a great man of peace, and he did manage to bring about an incredible transformation in South Africa, but to say he did it through peaceful means is just incorrect.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Peace_Prize#Criticism_of...
Kissinger's support of Pakistan was a direct processor to and some would say the enabler of the atrocities committed during the Bangladesh Liberation War. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger#1971_India.E2.8...)
Some would say that this was due to real-politic, but its entirely reasonable to suggest that this was due to Kissinger's personal hatred of Indira Gandhi(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger#cite_note-33)
More than a million civilians were killed and more than 30 million civilians were displaced during this genocide. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bangladesh_genocide
Kissinger's support to the Pakistan Army was in spite of the US's own officials aware of and dissenting to the policy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archer_Blood#The_Blood_telegram
All this was well known when Mr. Kissinger was awarded the prize. That award was unreasonable.
"Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize"
Implicit in that is that the prize might be given to people who turn out to be a disappointment.
In many ways this is actually a very hard prize to award, but I’m ok with that. Sure, it will fail from time to time, but that’s just human.
While that award is ridiculed outside the US too, I think few Americans appreciate just how terrifying the thought of anything like a continuation of the Bush legacy was to many people the rest of the world. We were shocked when he was elected the first time, and even more so that he became president a second time (and it doesn't matter that it was close, anything but a landslide for Gore would have still shocked us). It seemed like America had gone totally of the rails and was firmly headed into a level of previously unseen craziness.
After the election of Obama is the first time I've seen non-Americans in many larger European cities hold parties to celebrate the election of a US president.
It didn't matter that whether you believed his campaign promises or his background or that he is still far to the right of most of Europe - he was still someone who at least appeared to people to have some measure of intelligence and restraint. Someone who would at least listen to foreign leaders instead of some voice he believed to be God.
Merely by stemming the neocon tide, he was seen as a giant step forward (or backwards, to the saner era of e.g. Clinton, who was probably more popular in Europe than in the US, or even Bush senior; heck, we'd even take Reagan)
I can imagine some people may have believe that Obama's first election signified, well, Hope and Change.
But in the intervening years, we see that the Obama administration's foreign policy, at least as seen through its end effects, is scarcely distinguishable from that of GWB. The Iraq war "ended" precisely on the same schedule that GWB had put forward, we've found ourselves in an increasing number of armed conflicts, and we still seem to see the world as being beholden to American interests (e.g., countries around the world are expected to run their domestic policies such that they align with the US war on drugs).
So it doesn't seem like the Prize did very much to encourage Pres. Obama to continue on a promise of peace. And why should it? If he does continue, he's not going to get a second prize. And if he doesn't follow through, they're not going to take the prize away.
One might as well say to a child "since you said you'd clean your room, here's some candy to encourage you to actually do the cleaning".
> I can imagine some people may have believe that Obama's first election signified, well, Hope and Change.
I find that curious, though, because he went into the election with a relatively conservative platform. It's not that long ago that his policies would have made him fit squarely in the Republican party. It's presumably exactly because of this he was able to draw in such a big portion of the electorate. That, and being painted as the anti-Bush.
> One might as well say to a child "since you said you'd clean your room, here's some candy to encourage you to actually do the cleaning".
There's actual psychology research to back up the idea that giving a reward in anticipation of positive action is in many circumstances more effective than promising a reward after the fact (Influence by Cialdini covers several different approaches to this, with references) so that's not such an outlandish idea, though not perhaps with that particular wording.
In general, we have a very strong predisposition for consistency. If we are surrounded by signs that we are seen as the type of person who does X, then we are more likely to do X. But a promise of a reward does not signal we're the type of person who does X, it signals that we're the type of person who will do X when the benefit derived is perceived to be greater than the opportunity cost.
(It's not clear to be, btw., that the Peace Price to Obama even potentially had a beneficial effect on this basis; it's not like it's a lever you can pull and it'll always work as intended on every person - if you manage to do things right to trigger the effect, it improves your average level of influence)
There are at least three different levels to view this at. And thanks to the myth of the rational voter, there are plenty of people who decide that the appearance at one level is sufficient, and the cost/benefit of digging deeper isn't worthwhile.
On the surface, Obama was happy to allow people to believe something different even from what he was actually saying. Many pacifists supported him on this basis.
A level deeper, Obama was never anti-war. If you go back to the record, his only anti-war statements were specific to Iraq. He disliked the politics of that particular war, but never came out as a pacifist (contra those only looking skin-deep).
Deeper than that, we've got to consider political motivations behind his anti-Iraq-war stance. In retrospect it appears that this was largely a political position that was easy for Obama to take on because it entailed undermining GWB's (arguably illegally assumed) authority, thus shifting power away from the GOP and toward the DEMs. In this light, it's hardly surprising that he's chosen to eschew his opposition to unilateral executive power: when the shoe was on the other foot, he was able to obtain further political advantage by doubling down on the same abuses that he'd criticized just a few years earlier.
Of course people can change their minds, but you must remember not to rewrite history
It isn't rewriting history, even his fans were confused by that decision back then.