Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

Congratulations to President Obama on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. It was a great idea but the timing was not so helpful to President Obama or the United States.

I hope that people try to remember that in the last 9 months President Obama's international travel schedule, his speeches and the work being done by his surrogates - especially Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton - represent a renewal of the notion that in order claim being the leader of the free world we must promote diplomacy, attempt to find common ground, nurture relationships among nations and not simply stand in front of a military arsenal as our sole source of power. Preventing war is sometimes more difficult than waging one. There are too many nuclear powers out there to believe that military strength alone can win the day.

I already believed that President Obama could be a strong contender for the Prize during his presidency but awarding it to him this early opens the door for Republicans and Obama haters to minimize the value of the Prize. This is one topic where there are plenty of rational reasons to engage in some debate about what the Prize means, who deserves it and why we should care.

Woodrow Wilson won the Prize in 1919 not because he joined allies to fight WWI. He won it because he spent countless hours attempting to establish the League of Nations - the doomed precursor to the United Nations. He ultimately failed in that endeavor but those who bestowed the honor did so not because he won the war (he had plenty of help from other nations to do that) but because he made a huge effort to prevent future wars through the development of solid relationships and dialogue among nations. He spent months in France in the aftermath of that war to establish principles on which all free nations could agree. He got bogged down when some of those nations could not give up the idea that Germany had to be forced to pay reparations that bankrupted the country. Germany's humiliation had a role in the emergence of National Socialism. As Germans used wheelbarrows full of currency in order to buy bread during the 1920s, they permitted the emergence of Adolph Hitler to tell them what they wanted to hear. The winning allies in WWI not only got reparations. They also changed borders, cut off ethnic groups from each other and got their revenge. It took fewer than 20 years for Axis powers to build up a new arsenal of weapons and exploit the frustration and fears of their citizens to justify another World War.

At the conclusion of WWII, Wilson's vision became much more attractive to the victors. Instead of demanding reparations from Axis powers, the Roosevelt and Truman administrations hatched the Marshall Plan to help rebuild the vanquished nations. We stopped being stupid for a minute and realized that we would be better off paying billions to rebuild so we could actually trade with some of these countries and, at the same time, deprive the Soviet Union of establishing dominion over Western Europe. Had we decided to ignore the lessons of the aftermath of WWI and leave Europe in ruins, I believe we would all be speaking Russian today - and not by choice.

Obama understands this history. His predecessor apparently did not. If you don't think President Obama deserves the Prize (at least now), then we must look to history. Wilson's Prize came after a spectacular failure but he made the effort and was later proved to be right about what he hoped to accomplish. If Obama's Prize is inappropriate, so was Wilson's.