The agenda of the Nobel Peace Prize

Why Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for nothing — and Trump never will for anything

By Mary Kay Linge

November 2, 2019 | 8:51am | Updated 

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"It is true, [Barack] Obama did not do much before winning" a Nobel Peace Prize, says author Geir Lundestad, who was on the committee who awarded it to him.SIPA USA/SIPA

President Barack Obama’s first act as a Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2009 — nine months after he took the oath of office — was to try to wriggle out of accepting it.

“The morning the prize was announced, his staff investigated whether anyone had failed to travel to Oslo to receive their prize,” writes Nobel insider Geir Lundestad in “The World’s Most Prestigious Prize” (Oxford), out this month.

Apparently, the president was among the 61 percent of Americans who believed he didn’t deserve it.

“It is true, Obama did not do much before winning,” Lundestad, 74, a member of Norway’s Nobel Committee until 2014, told The Post. “But he represented the ideals of the committee. And when we have an American president who supports that message, we like to strengthen him.”

Obama’s advisers soon decided the honor could not be refused. But as ridicule rained down on the committee for handing a peacemaker’s award to a man who was ordering drone strikes on civilians overseas, the White House grew increasingly hesitant, dithering for weeks over how much of the traditional three-day awards gala he would attend.

In the end, Obama stayed just long enough to deliver an acceptance speech that tried to justify the wars he was waging in Iraq and Afghanistan — rationalizations that visibly irked First Lady Michelle Obama.“Did you have to go there?” she asked when he concluded, according to Lundestad’s book.

The committee’s risky choice backfired, Lundestad admits, as the new president took flak from all sides for accepting it before he had accomplished any of his lofty foreign policy goals. Even supporters like Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus called the prize “ridiculous — embarrassing, even.” David Axelrod, a top Obama advisor, said it was “more of a surreal challenge than a cause for celebration.”

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Author Geir LundestadKyodo via AP Images

“It would be difficult, even impossible, for Obama to live up to the enormous expectations,” Lundestad writes. “I personally greatly doubted their decision.”

But the committee members took the chance out of sheer exultation that a Republican no longer resided in the White House, Lundestad suggests in his book, an expanded English-language version of a memoir he published in Norwegian in 2015.

Of the 100 Nobel Peace Prizes bestowed since 1901, 22 of them have gone to Americans — far more than any other nation in the world. The entire continent of Africa has produced only 11 Peace Prize winners, including this year’s laureate, Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia.

It’s a matter of geopolitics, Lundestad explained. “It is always Norwegian policy to maintain a good relationship with the United States,” he said. “Russia is our neighbor, and we need a big friend.”

The Nobel Committee, under the terms of Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will, is made up of prominent Norwegians who share a particular worldview.

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The resulting philosophy of “liberal internationalism” prioritizes globalist organizations over national governments and boosts ideas like arms control and environmentalism.

“To Norwegians it is almost as if the USA is split in two,” Lundestad writes. “A liberal and democratic country with which we feel solidarity and a conservative country for which we have little respect.”

Three of the four prize-winning American presidents have been Democrats: Obama, Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter. The sole Republican is Theodore Roosevelt, who won it in 1906 as a progressive whose outlook bears little resemblance to that of today’s GOP.

Almost all of the other US honorees — such as Al Gore, Martin Luther King Jr. and anti-nuclear activist Linus Pauling — have been on the left end of our political spectrum. “The warmth of our relationship with the US is of course much higher with a left-of-center president,” Lundestad said.

Ronald Reagan was pointedly snubbed in 1990 when the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev won a solo Peace Prize for ending the Cold War.

“Gorbachev was not a true democrat, obviously,” Lundestad said — making him one of the committee’s most controversial picks. But Reagan’s peace-through-strength policies were so unpopular in Norway that a Nobel for him was unthinkable.

President Trump has been nominated for the prize by two Norwegian legislators — valid nominators, under committee rules — for his peace overtures to North Korea. But his “America First” ideology and aversion to globalism make him an equally unlikely candidate. “I probably will never get it,” Trump said in February. “I think I’ll get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things — if they gave it out fairly, which they don’t,” Trump complained again during September’s UN General Assembly.

It’s the one thing on which Lundestad and the president agree.

“I would be extremely surprised if Donald Trump ever received the Nobel Peace Prize,” Lundestad said. “He may say he wants to bring peace to the Middle East or the Korean Peninsula, but he has not accomplished anything,” he added. “And his policies do not fall into line with the ideas of liberal internationalism” — no matter how those efforts may turn out.