Due to my work schedule, I am late to the discussion of President Obama's receipt of the Nobel prize, although this diary builds on a comment I left here yesterday morning.
What they've done is very interesting (32+ / 0-)
The Nobel Commission is hemming Obama in. It's brilliant. Now, whatever he does, he does as a Nobel Peace Laureate. So in his decision about what to do in Afghanistan, he has to ask himself not simply "what should an American President do?" but "what should a Nobel Peace Laureate do?" He probably should turn it down just because they are clearly trying to tie his hands in that way -- but I like the way that they are trying to tie his hands so I won't complain.
I wish that every President saw themselves as having to live up to the billing of "Nobel Peace Laureate" -- now, with Obama, it's simply going to be explicit
While evidently everything and its opposite was said about this event yesterday, and I haven't read it all, some points about this award seem to me to have been underemphasized, at least. I want to expand on that -- with a little sociological theory -- here.
The first thing I'll note is that if we're trying to explain why the Nobel Committee made this choice, all we have to explain is the motivations of the committee itself. Obama did not make this decision. Europe did not make this decision. The people who made this decision are five Norwegian politicians who, I hope we can all agree, are trying to use the power vested in them to do their best to improve the world. This points to three motivations on the committee's part.
(1)
So: how does one improve the world? One way is to get the world's attention. This award -- which is logically justifiable but still does feel premature -- grabs the world's attention the way the same award in 2010, 2012, 2016, and 2017 would not. As media critic Marshal McLuhan famously said, "the medium is the message here." The prematurity of this award, it's slightly vertiginous timing, is part of the message. The award is audacious. It invites argument and controversy. That is good for the Nobel Committee itself, as it tries to help change the world. They're not idiots; they wanted to stir the pot this way. They wanted to invoke, quite literally, "the audacity of hope."
(2)
I doubt that the committee would have made this choice, though, if there was no plausible basis for it, and Obama's efforts on arms control (both in the Senate and as President) do provide one. Another reason, more implicitly offered, is that offered in Nashville fan's excellent diary from yesterday: the world appreciates, and damn well should appreciate, Obama's stepping back from the Bush-Cheney era Rein of Terror. We forget -- although the rest of the world does not -- that the U.S. spends more on its military, and has more projective power -- than all of the rest of the countries who would plausibly be involved in global warfare combined. The previous Administration put forth the philosophy that we should use that power to dominate the world and force it to do our bidding. For Obama to step away from that general philosophy -- regardless of what choices he makes in specific instances like Afghanistan -- is a huge development in international diplomacy. The only thing that keeps it from being titanic is that it may well be impermanent -- but locking in that philosophy is our problem to solve.
(3)
The other important thing that the committee was doing, as noted in my comment from yesterday, requires you to either know a little sociological theory or to remember the plots of thousands of sitcoms and comedies of manners based on it. (If commenters come up with their favorite examples, I'll post them in this box:
Update: As promised, some suggestions have been offered.
jhop7 suggests Kevin Kline's character in Dave, who has to take over the Presidency for a George H.W. Bush clone.
By e-mail, a new Koster who can't even comment yet (but who can claim credit for this when he or she does) offers a wonderful example: John Heard's character, lawyer Charlie Bloom in Robert Redford's lovely film The Milagro Beanfield War, whom Sonia Braga bulldogs into helping to save the town against his will and better judgment.
This box is expandable; there's room for more!
In these plots, which we might call The Reluctant Hero, a protagonist has no intention of fulfilling a certain role that might constrain them. But, through madcap events, someone identifies them publicly as someone who is going to be filling that role, and they are celebrated and thanked effusively by observers for what they're going to do. That locks them into a role, however reluctantly, and they generally (in comic plots) rise to the occasion.
Sometimes this is: "this is the lawyer who is going to save our town from the big nasty corporation!" ("Huh? Me?")
Sometimes this is: "this is the man who is going to marry our daughter!" ("Huh? Me?")
Sometimes this is: "this is the woman who is going to help us start our home business!" ("Huh? Me?")
Sometimes this is: "hey, this is the girl who's gonna strip for us at our bachelor party!" ("Huh? Me?")
Sometimes this is: "this is the guy who's going to beat up the guy who tried to get our sister to strip at a bachelor party!" ("Huh? Me?")
Rarely, this is: "this is the man who is going to restore sanity and anti-belligerence to American foreign policy!"
Once those expectations have been been built up for you, and you accept them, it becomes very hard to move out of your role. Other people's expectations -- their potential sense of betrayal -- are powerful. Appearing to prepare to meet those expectations and then failing to do so is worse than not having come forward at all. When someone else puts you forward -- when you are a reluctant and unexpected hero -- well, you have a problem.
What the wily Norwegians have done, I think intentionally, is to impose that problem -- of living up to the expectations of world opinion and of history -- on Obama. If they were putting him in a role to try to get him to do something bad, one could say that they were offering him a Poisoned Apply. In fact, though, they're trying to get him to do something good, even if it's something that, for political reasons, he may be reluctant to do, so we might say that they're offering him an Anti-Poisoned Apply.
Last year’s Nobel laureate, former President Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, gets it. Here's his comment on Middle East peace:
“Of course, this puts pressure on Obama,” he said. “The world expects that he will also achieve something.”
In an island of sanity among a sea of otherwise mostly idiotic commentary on Slate, Christopher Beam gets it:
From now on, everything he does will have the stamp, however indirect, of the world's most prestigious prize:
President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama will meet this morning with his Cabinet to discuss strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This afternoon, President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama will host a picnic for United States Secret Service employees and their families. Later in the day, President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama will go to the gym, check Facebook, and tuck his daughters into bed.
...
Anything he does will now have some added symbolic heft: In an international climate where President doesn't have much gravitas anymore, President and Nobel Peace Prize Winner does. Whether it's asking India to step up emissions controls, negotiating sanctions with Iran, or discussing free trade in Latin America, Obama now has added prestige, if not authority.
...
Politically, ... the prize is unlikely to hurt Obama that much. For most Americans, being liked by the rest of the world is a good thing. And in international relations, Obama could actually use the prize to be more hawkish. Even Nobel Prize winner Barack Obama thinks we should bomb Iran, could be a talking point three years from now. Think of it as a deposit of political capital—only from the international left rather than the American center.
(Yeah, that's a danger. Obama is not your average sitcom dummy.)
Do you know who else gets it? Senator James Inhofe. He just doesn't like it. TPM quotes Inhofe saying that Obama
got the prize for "de-emphasizing defense in favor of multi-national cooperation," an approach with which Inhofe disagrees.
Inhofe worries that the prize could go to Obama's head, and lead him to "de-emphasize defense" even more, especially on the battlefields of Afghanistan.
"If he genuinely was on the fence, and now he gets this prize, it could lead him to reject the feelings of the military commanders" calling for more troops, Inhofe said.
Yeah, that's pretty much what the wily Norwegians had in mind -- though for them and for us on this site, that's a good thing, not something to fear. I predict, though, that Obama will prove himself to be no sitcom "Reluctant Hero": he'll do what he thinks he should, dovish or hawkish, because he thinks that he should. Largely, I don't think that this prize will change him.
At the margins, though, in close cases, especially in a second term when his thoughts will inevitably turn towards his legacy, Obama may well find himself thinking that when he acts now, he acts in dual roles. Not only is "The President" doing something, but "The Nobel Laureate" is doing something. That may exert only a slight pressure on him, to live up to the latter role, but in some close cases that gently urging pressure may be decisive.
The Nobel Committee was looking ahead to that day, when the repercussions of yesterday's decision may have a decisive effect sometime down the line. It's not a bad theory and it's not a bad plan. Startled as I was at their audacious choice, on reflection I'm glad that they made it, and that they made it audaciously. I think we'd be better off if every American President saw himself or herself as a potential Nobel Peace laureate. I think that we'll be better off if this President feels some pressure to live up to the role that the crafty Norwegians, our political allies, have already thrust upon him.