Mick Hartley

The Nobel Committee certainly got what they wanted with the Peace Prize Award to President Obama in 2009: a US which would no longer intervene militarily, but would talk….and talk and talk. So….Syria….Aleppo. Happy now? Did we get the new peaceful world they dreamed of, free at last of American imperial hubris?

Sohrab Ahmari in the WSJ:

Seven years ago this week the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to Barack Obama. The decision was greeted with ridicule in the U.S., and it unsettled even supporters of the president, who hadn’t finished his first year in office. Still Mr. Obama flew to Oslo and delivered one of his trademark speeches. The philosopher-president was the toast of Europe.

Mr. Obama today almost never mentions the prize, and the Nobel Committee’s former secretary has expressed regret over the choice. Barack Obama the Nobelist is a bad memory among Europeans, who face more pressing concerns, chief among them a Syrian civil war that has flooded the Continent with more than a million refugees….

The committee that awarded the prize hoped for an America that would no longer play the hegemon. The Norwegians wanted a U.S. president who would “strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” as the Nobel citation put it. A leader who would emphasize “the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play,” whose decisions would track the “attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”…

At his Nobel lecture in Oslo, Mr. Obama declared: “I am convinced that adhering to standards, international standards, strengthens those who do, and isolates and weakens those who don’t.”

The real-world results are a different matter. They are on display in Aleppo, where the Bashar Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian patrons are close to bringing to heel Syria’s last non-Islamic State opposition stronghold. Syrian forces shell houses and drop shrapnel-packed barrels on what remains of the city’s civilian buildings. Vladimir Putin’s pilots stalk the skies, setting women and children alight with incendiary ordnance.

In Oslo in 2009, Mr. Obama said of situations like the one unfolding in Syria: “Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.” How costly?

During Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, Republican Gov. Mike Pence spoke of creating no-fly zones to protect civilians while Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine floated a “humanitarian zone” in Aleppo. The trouble is that the Kremlin this week deployed the SA-23 Gladiator anti-air system to Syria for the first time. The SA-23 can take down aircraft as well as missiles. It is an insurance policy for the Assad regime that will raise the stakes in any future U.S. military action.

With his endless patience for rogues, in other words, Mr. Obama has tied the hands of his successor. Set aside the human misery in Syria. Set aside, too, the destabilizing effects of millions of refugees on Syria’s neighboring states and Europe. The expansion of Russian and Iranian influence in the Middle East represents a long-term strategic setback for the West.

Mr. Putin’s pilots are also increasingly menacing European homelands, with the French Defense Ministry revealing Wednesday that Russian military aircraft last month skirted the airspaces of France, Norway, Spain and the U.K., forcing all four countries to scramble jets. This, too, is the fruit of the humbler Washington the Europeans wished for in 2009.

One question that lingers seven years later: What did the Nobel Committee imagine would follow when America assumed an unexceptional role on the world stage? In the U.S., some thought American retrenchment might spur Europeans to finally take responsibility for securing the Continent’s peripheries. This wasn’t an unreasonable assumption, but it proved wrong. Europeans remain as parochial as ever.

The Nobel Committee, and the intellectual class whose preferences it reflected, had loftier ideas. In 2009 they thought that, without U.S. “unilateralism,” the world could settle enmity and evil the same way the EU resolves disputes over agricultural subsidies. This was when EU boosters like the historian Tony Judt still wrote of the 21st century as a European century—when the rest of the world would embrace the European way of dialogue.

Seven years later the Europeans can barely solve their subsidy disputes, and the Continent has had quite enough of the philosopher-president.

Obama hasn't even stayed true to his stated belief that "adhering to standards, international standards, strengthens those who do, and isolates and weakens those who don’t". No country, save North Korea, has less respect for international standards than Iran – and no country has been more rewarded by the President.

At least we didn't get that Clinton/Kerry award for the Iran deal, as a fake news report claimed. Nor, god help us, Edward Snowden. Instead we have Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, whose peace deal with FARC has just been, um, rejected by the Colombian people as being far too lenient to the murderers of FARC - who had already been crushed by the army to the extent that Colombia is now already on the way to being a major tourist destination.

So they haven't lost their touch, these Nobel Committee geniuses.