A Nobel Offering

So President Barack Obama is to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. And thoroughly merited it is too. One only has to recall his unstinting efforts that finally brought a durable peace to the Middle East, his agreement with President Medvedev to eliminate all American and Russian nuclear weapons, the leadership he provided during the international negotiations that led to a universal treaty that will drastically reduce global carbon emissions, and the fact that through the sheer force of his personal diplomacy he persuaded both Kim Jong Il of North Korea and President Ahmadinejad of Iran to abandon their nuclear weapons programmes.

Or at least the award would be merited had even one these events actually taken taken place. Instead, President Obama has received this award barely half a year into his presidency, having to date achieved only modest foreign policy successes. Even Mr Obama's supporters concede that the Prize is something of a surprise and might even - if handled badly - cause him political difficulties at home.

On the other hand, when set against past-winners of the award, maybe President Obama isn't such a bad choice. One thinks of Henry Kissinger, responsible for the vast bombing campaign over North Vietnam, or even Al Gore, who did little more than turn his PowerPoint display into a film that said global warming was a Bad Thing.

To date, though, Mr Obama's foreign policy has promised much but delivered little. This, of course, is hardly surprising. The guy has only been in the job for half a year - you're not going to bring peace to the Middle East in that kind of time frame. Moreover, the foreign policy decisions the president has made have certainly been encouraging. The effort to try and put relations with Russia on a sounder footing and ignore the less than wholly liberal nature of its current government is probably, on balance, correct, as long as the US is extracting some concessions from Russia in return. In a similar vein, the cancellation of the missile defence system that was due to be installed in East-Central Europe was another bold foreign policy move. The decision is unpopular in this part of the world mainly because the current Polish government had reluctantly acquiesced to the Bush administration's plans despite their unpopularity in Poland. Having taken a political risk, there is now resentment that the US is retreating from their plans, and there is a feeling that Poland is being treated once again as a pawn in the great power diplomacy between Russia and America. Yet the Obama administration, adopting a coldly realist approach, no doubt concluded that the missile shield was more trouble than it was worth. If President Obama can find a politically feasible way of extricating America from the morass that is Afghanistan, he has the beginnings of a good foreign policy record.

Even so, the best one can say about the Nobel Committee's decision is that it is extraordinarily premature. Mr Obama has the potential to be a great foreign policy president, if he possesses the political guile, nerve and of course luck to overcome all the foreign policy pitfalls that he faces. Had the Committee awarded the prize towards the end of Mr Obama's second term, when he had achieved several significant foreign policy breakthroughs, it would at least have been comprehensible. To award it to him now, though, has only resulted in a general feeling of bemusement.