Many have praised Obama’s Nobel Prize speech, but few have read it with critical attention. The speech is actually two speeches artfully woven together. One, which is unexceptionable, concerns war in general, its place in human society. The second concerns the USA, its place in the history of war. In equating the US with the world, Obama repeated a trope used by many Presidents (Franklin Roosevelt was an exception). However, this sliding between the US and the world leads the speech into three major contradictions which can be seen 1) in the awarding of the Prize in the first place, and in Obama’s acceptance of it, 2) in the intellectual framework of the acceptance speech, and its presumed audience and 3) in the content of the speech.

The first act that set everything askew was the awarding of the Prize in the first place. Nobel Peace prizes are given for positive accomplishments, such as the negotiation of a treaty or the banning of a weapon. Obama received his prize not for anything he had done, but for what he was not, namely Bush or, more precisely, Cheney. Thorbjørn Jadland, the head of the Committee, actually stated this in an interview. But if the Prize is given for the repudiation of something bad in the past, why did not the later Bush get it for repudiating the mistakes of his first two years. Why didn’t Gates get it for not being Rumsfeld? Why didn’t Nikita Khruschev receive the prize in 1956 for his repudiation of Stalin, a far more thorough break than Obama ever made with Bush? In fact, the prize was a craven kow-tow to the American President expressing the hope that he will not only talk but act for peace, which he certainly has not.

The second distortion of the speech lay in its framework and audience. Some commentators, such as Charles Todd of MSNBC, argue that the speech was directed toward a European audience. Not at all. It was directed at American “independents” and written entirely from within an American frame of mind. In that frame there are only two possibilities: the Neo-Cons and the cold war liberals. Is it too much for me to suggest that this overly narrows the field. After all, the Neo-Cons were largely crazy. Perhaps they were not quite as crazy as the Nazis who sought to unify all German-speaking peoples and subordinate the Slavs, but they were in that general direction. In posing himself against the Neo-Cons, Obama makes things awfully easy. In fact, the world is full of many different points of view on how to preserve global security, such as those of the EU, which place far less reliance on military, or those of China, or those of the victims of war themselves. Obama ignores these to stay within the American framework, as if America is the world.

The third distortion lies in the content of the speech. Obama clearly implies that Afghanistan is a just war. He doesn’t directly say this because it is patently untrue. A just war can never be fought in retribution for a harm, as the 2001 war was fought, but only after all options have been exhausted and an imminent danger to life remains. In 2001 the US pretext for the war came when the Taliban refused to turn over Osama Bin Laden without evidence, and insisted on turning him over to an international tribune. That was not a justification for a just war.

Obama’s other claim is that the US has underwritten global security since 1945. Certainly, if one thinks that the Soviet Union sought to conquer Western Europe, then perhaps it is American armies and American missiles that saved the continent, allowing Europeans to develop the health plans and job security that Americans, in helping others, denied themselves. The truth, however, is that the Soviet Union was not about to invade Europe, that Europeans and others have been consistently capable of defending themselves, and that the US has not only militarized parts of Europe, but also caused a countless series of unnecessary wars elsewhere, generally aimed at defeating progressive forces such as Allende, Arbenz, Mossadegh, Nasser, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and the like because private American economic interests were threatened.

Fundamentally, Obama’a speech rested on one assumption: America has been a benign force in World Affairs except during the early Bush years. If you buy this idea, you can accept the speech. But if you believe, as I do, that Bush represented an egregiously overt expression of the fundamentally self-righteous, bullying, aggrandizing and hostile character of post-World War Two American politics, then the wobbly character of Obama’s claims become not only unmistakable but repugnant.


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