The Booby Prize

Kevin nails it:

On Tuesday Barack Obama will announce a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan. A week later he'll be in Oslo accepting his Nobel Peace Prize. Pretty good timing, no?

Don't get me wrong; I believe Obama did earn the Nobel Peace Prize.

But he's going to accept it with the Vietnam Quagmire Monkey already clinging to his back.

Last month, Naomi Klein wrote in The Nation about the danger that Obama's administration poses to the world.

Of all the explanations for Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, the one that rang truest came from French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "It sets the seal on America's return to the heart of all the world's peoples." In other words, this was Europe's way of saying to America, "We love you again"--sort of like those weird "renewal of vows" ceremonies that couples have after surviving a rough patch.

Now that Europe and the United States are officially reunited, it seems worth asking: is this necessarily a good thing? The Nobel Committee, which awarded the prize specifically for Obama's embrace of "multilateral diplomacy," is evidently convinced that US engagement on the world stage is a triumph for peace and justice.

I'm not so sure. After nine months in office, Obama has a clear track record as a global player. Again and again, US negotiators have chosen not to strengthen international laws and protocols but rather to weaken them, often leading other rich countries in a race to the bottom.

She cites Obama-led retreats on climate change, on condemning racism (!), on human rights, on controlling financial speculation, then concludes:

Of course, Obama has made some good moves on the world stage--not siding with the coup government in Honduras, supporting a UN Women's Agency... But a clear pattern has emerged: in areas where other wealthy nations were teetering between principled action and negligence, US interventions have tilted them toward negligence. If this is the new era of multilateralism, it is no prize.

Read the whole thing.