Obama in Oslo

I found Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize speech pretty disappointing. I read a bunch of commentary on the speech before actually reading it, so I was primed to be annoyed by the part of the speech where he takes on the left. But I thought that section was fairly measured. That said, it’s worth noting that pretty much every political leader who wants to launch a post-WWII military campaign starts by invoking the war against the Nazis.

This is what gets to the weakness of Obama’s speech. When discussing the role that the weapons of war have to play in securing the piece, he gets specific. He doesn’t just say that some wars could be just, he says that some particular wars were and are just.

Which is great. But the discussion of unjust wars is airy and vague. For example, to make the only mention of Iraq in a speech about just and unjust wars and the United States’ role in the world that “One of these wars is winding down” is just flat-out evasive. If Obama had wanted to defend Iraq as a just war, that would have been a gutsy way of taking on the left. Alternatively, he could have denounced Iraq as unjust. That would have had the added benefit of helping to make more sense out of the idea of Obama winning a Nobel Peace Prize. After all, if under George W. Bush the United States was committed to an unjust doctrine of unilateral preventive military action as a major policy tool, then the world was in a frightening situation. A frightening situation that Barack Obama, perhaps, brought to a close by winning the election, denouncing the Bush Doctrine as unjust, and repudiating it. That would have been a gutsy way of taking on the right and claiming the prize for himself.

The speech he actually gave was more politically astute than either of those options, but it leaves a giant elephant in the room. There seems to me to be a huge tension between the demands placed on Obama the practical politician and Obama the Nobel recipient.