Obama’s Questionable 2009 Nobel Peace Prize

Henry Kissinger (USA, 1973), Menahem Begin (Israel, 1978), Aung San Suu Kyi (Myanmar, 1991), Rigoberta Menchú (Guatemala 1992), Yasser Arafat (Palestine Liberation Organization, 1994), Kim Dae-jeong (South Korea, 2000), Wangarĩ Muta Maathai (Kenya, 2004) and Abiy Ahmed (Ethiopia, 2019) are often listed among the most problematic winners of the Nobel Peace Prize over the last 50 years. But none, in my view, can match the 2009 awardee—Barack Obama.

The 44th American president had been in office for just 11 days when nominations for the 2009 prize ended. About 200 names, including his, were put forth. It is fair to ask, however, what he could have done in less than two weeks to be worthy of nomination for the world’s most prestigious award. A baseball metaphor, if you will: This was like giving a rookie the MVP award on the opening day of the season. He had until January 20, 2017 to finish his two terms in the White House, and only then or even later could his legacy be properly assessed. Piedad Cordoba of Colombia, Sima Samar of Afghanistan, Hu Jia of China and Morgan Tsvangirai of Zimbabwe were considered the favorites for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. There are also prizes in chemistry, physics, physiology or medicine and literature, but they are not fraught with the same potential for controversy. “Peace” is obviously a nebulous concept, one open to wide-ranging interpretation. To wit: Kissinger, et al.

Deliberations among the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee are private, and so it is impossible to say how they picked Obama. Their decision, which they claimed to be unanimous, was one that stunned the world. The chairman in 2009 was Thorbjorn Jagland, about whom pointed criticism was made after the vote. Nobel secretary Geir Lundstad wrote in his 2015 memoirs that Jagland was wholly incompetent and should not have been on the committee, much less leading it. Lundstad also expressed regrets about the choice of Obama. Jagland, whose brief tenure as Norway’s prime minister abounded with scandals and disputations, was often ridiculed and noted for keeping his head in the sand about the growing number of Muslims in his country. If that’s not bad enough, he later admitted to having held a confab with the notorious Jeffrey Epstein in 2013.

When the committee made its announcement, it cited Obama’s call for a world free of nuclear weapons, his plan to fight global warming, his support for the United Nations and multilateral diplomacy, and “giving the world hope.” That was little more than campaign rhetoric, and even the most politically naïve person understands the huge gap between campaigning and governing; the former is not to be confused with the latter. Obama also drew praise for his “soaring eloquence,” as if speechmaking equated peacemaking. The Norwegians, thrown on the defensive, claimed Obama had been an “aspirational choice” and they hoped winning would “strengthen” him in achieving his goals.

Few people other than card-carrying members of the Democratic Party came out in favor. Obama had clearly done nothing to merit winning the Nobel Peace Prize, even by the time of his award ceremony in Oslo on December 10, 2009. Editorial writers in the USA and Europe discerned that it was a not-so-subtle slap in the face for George W. Bush, Obama’s predecessor. Bush had, it’s true, started an unnecessary war in Iraq and behaved like a cowboy on the international stage. The Norwegians denied any such skullduggery. But this was not the first time, nor the last.

“The prize is losing credibility,” said Unni Turrettini, author of Betraying the Nobel: The Secrets and Corruption Behind the Nobel Peace Prize. “And when it loses credibility, it loses the potential impact that the prize can have on world peace.” Henrik Urdal of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo concurred, asserting that in recent years the Nobel Committee has “tried to give awards for processes, and that’s an extremely risky business.”

Obama was purportedly surprised by his selection, but he did not turn it (and the accompanying $1.4 million) down. He went to Oslo, gave a 36-minute speech, met with Norwegian PM Jens Stoltenberg and was gone in a day; most winners stay for three. His Scandinavian hosts could not have been pleased to see him skip numerous events.

In that speech, Obama promised a much-improved situation in Afghanistan by July 2011. Sending another 30,000 American troops there did not work—so much for reversing the militarism of Bush. He also expanded the drone strike program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. While the world was marginally more peaceful during his administration than in Bush’s, deaths from terrorism were up, as were the number of refugees and displaced people. Closing Gitmo had been a cornerstone pledge of Obama’s first campaign, but it was still open when he left office.

Far worse was Obama’s failure to bring domestic peace. The offspring of a White mother and a black father, he ran in 2008 as a “post-racial” candidate. The left-leaning media loved that, and he went on to defeat the Republican John McCain, and Mitt Romney four years later. His pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Jeremiah Wright, made countless racist and anti-Semitic remarks in sermons, speeches and interviews. Obama distanced himself from Wright, but slowly and reluctantly, and only because he was suffering political damage.

He played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. This one-time community organizer was highly adroit. Like most people, he wanted to have it both ways and since he was part black that was permitted. His policies and appointments as president embodied the critical race theory (CRT) ideas that are now having such a deleterious effect on America’s social and political fabric. Had he never been POTUS, the New York Times’ now-discredited “1619 Project” might not have been written or published, protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020 would not have been so intense and destructive, and black people’s embrace of their victimhood—notwithstanding the fact that they commit the large majority of violent crime in the USA—would have been mitigated. Outlandish ideas like de-funding the police and eliminating prisons would never have been suggested. Furthermore, the non-stop blaming and indeed demonization of White people might have been avoided. Insidious identity politics is nothing new, but it really took off when Obama was president. His critics, and there are many (albeit fewer than for Donald Trump or Joe Biden), call him the country’s No. 1 race baiter. If that’s a bit harsh, I do see their point.

For these reasons and more, honest and intelligent people of whatever ethnicity are offended that Obama is a Nobel laureate. He never should have been nominated or chosen, and he simply failed to live up to the ideals Alfred Nobel set out in bequeathing most of his wealth for the creation of a prize to recognize those who “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” Not even close.