PRESIDENT BARACK Obama will walk to the podium in Oslo City Hall at noon Irish time today to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. Even more than his remarks to the UN General Assembly in September, this is Mr Obama’s opportunity to influence the minds of all mankind, a formidable challenge in a lecture slated to last less than half an hour.
Mr Obama is writing the address himself, with the help of his speech writers Ben Rhodes and Jon Favreau. The text will have historical resonance and express humility. And especially, it will thrash out the apparent contradiction of a president who has just significantly escalated the war in Afghanistan winning a peace prize.
To prepare himself, Mr Obama studied the speeches of previous Nobel winners, including Nelson Mandela, who won the prize in 1993, Martin Luther King jnr (1964), Theodore Roosevelt (1906) and Woodrow Wilson (1919).
Mr Obama is the third sitting US president to win the prize. A fourth, Jimmy Carter, won the award in 2002, hours after Congress gave George W Bush the authority to invade Iraq. Mr Obama, like Mr Carter, is assumed to have won the prize in part because he is not George W Bush.
When the award was announced on October 9th, Mr Obama said he was “surprised and deeply humbled” and felt he did not deserve it.
The prize has proved something of a poisoned chalice in the US, where Mr Obama’s critics carp that he is the only laureate to have won it for making speeches.
The president recognised that its attribution was aspirational – “an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations” – rather than based on concrete achievements to date.
Mr Obama is likely to return to the themes of nuclear disarmament and harmony between the world’s great religions, which he addressed in Prague and Cairo earlier this year. But he is expected to concentrate on Afghanistan, his greatest foreign policy dilemma.
“How do you reconcile your role as a commander in chief with your aspirations to promote a more peaceful world at a time of war? That’s a question that he’s going to explore in some detail,” Mr Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, told the New York Times.
When he announced the deployment of 30,000 additional troops on December 1st, Mr Obama used the word “peace” only once, and only to recall that the purpose of the international force in Afghanistan was “to help bring a lasting peace to a war-torn country”.
He might quote Jimmy Carter, who said in his own Nobel lecture seven years ago: “War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good.”
If Mr Obama is truly courageous, he will take the advice of Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wants him to announce the parameters of a Middle East peace settlement and ask the rest of the world to get behind it. The settlement would be based on the January 2001 Taba proposals, the 2002 Arab initiative and the 2003 Geneva accords.
