There have been a lot of people who have questioned why, after only nine months in office, Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. No sitting U.S. president since Woodrow Wilson has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, making this a very unusual decision. Why did the Nobel Foundation make their surprising decision? Equally puzzling is why did the Republicans have reacted in such an extremely partisan way to that decision?

The answer to those puzzles is becoming clear. Consider first why Obama deserves the award, then what the reaction of the American right wing to the award shows about them. Finally, consider what the award of the Peace Prize to Obama has done to advance the cause of world peace. Steve Clemons tells us why Obama and why now. The Nobel Peace Prize is primarily for actions that have an impact on the world rather than just a single nation. Since most Americans focus primarily on domestic events. They tend to be quite oblivious to what is happening on the world stage, so the action by the Nobel Foundation was especially surprising. Americans haven't been aware of the impact that Obama has already had on the world stage. Here's Steve's explanation.

The world has been mesmerized by Obama since he started to run for the presidency. The battle between Hillary Clinton and Obama for the Democratic nomination did more to educate the rest of the world about real political choice -- and about a system in which no candidates had an automatic lock on victory -- than any USAID program could have achieved.

Obama's decision to make the ulcerous Israeli-Palestinian negotiations one of the first foreign policy challenges of his administration, rather than the last, defied most seasoned analysts' expectations. His message to Iran's citizens, marking the Persian new year holiday of Nowruz, and his powerful and captivating speech in Cairo, Egypt, communicated to Muslims all around the world that their lives and their faith and their expectations for a better world were vital and as valid as any others.

From his perch in the White House, Barack Obama affirmed the humanity of Muslims and told them that America does value Muslim lives.

Obama's posture and rhetoric have reversed the collapse of hope and trust that the world's citizens had in America and stopped the degradation of America's image during the tenure of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney.

Should a U.S. president get the Nobel Peace Prize if he's about to send more U.S. troops, armed drones, bombs, tanks and other military hardware into the war-ripped zones in Afghanistan?

Or should Obama get the prize if he hasn't even succeeded in getting Israeli-Palestinian negotiations going? Or if he hasn't gotten Iran to drop its nuclear ambitions and to re-enter the international system on constructive terms?

The answer is yes.

[...]

What is brilliant about Obama and why he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize is that he is a global leader who clearly saw the gains that could be made in changing "the optics" of the global order, upgrading the level of respect between the United States and other nations, making a point of listening to other leaders.

Obama saw that before the world could move to a more stable and better global equilibrium, it had to believe it could -- and this is what Obama has done in ways that no other leader has in memory.

[...]

 ...the Nobel Prize Committee has shrewdly given a key down payment for a kind of leadership it wants to see from the U.S. for many more years and given Obama another tool to help craft a new global social contract between the United States and other responsible stakeholders in the international system.

So that's why Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize now, even though he has only been in office a very short time. The next question is why the American right-wingers have reacted in such a negative and unpatriotic way to the award from Oslo.

The answer to that is reasonably clear when you consider the nature of conservatives and recognize their frustration as Obama has slipped their grasp. They "know" that Obama is wrong as President. He is not one of them, one of the superior class. The President should always be one of their own. They thought that after this summer they were winning. They were returning America to the "proper" balance and were constraining Obama's ability to act. The Nobel Foundation's award of the Peace Prize to Obama threatens all of their progress. And that threat comes from outside the United States, which makes the conservatives even angrier.

Conservatives are by definition traditionalists. They dislike social change and they have a strong sense that there is a given social order, one they belong at the top of. For Obama to become President upsets the social order as they see it and represents the threat of change. Their reaction to that threat is to be viscerally upset, and they are reacting with anger and frustration. They have been escalating the anger since Obama won the election last November. They clearly thought that they were succeeding in limiting what Obama could accomplish in office. They were delighted when they watched the Olympic committee reject Obama's pitch to give the Olympics to Chicago because it confirmed their belief that he is the wrong man to be President. The reaction of the right-wing talk show hosts and the Republican political leaders expressed the conservative pleasure that the world made sense. They were a pack on the hunt, and they had their prey cornered. Copenhagen confirmed that to them last week.

This week the Nobel Peace Prize Committee snatched away their prey.

Not only did Obama slip their grasp, the Peace Prize gives him a position that will provide some protection from their attacks from now on. All of their work over the last year to prove that Obama is not the legitimate President has been countered by the prestigious Nobel Peach Prize. It's what the Nobel Committee did for Martin Luther King, Lech Wałęsa, Desmond Tutu and for Aung San Suu Kyi.

The conservatives thought they had Obama trapped and almost neutered. They were going to return the American social order to what they are certain it should be. The Nobel Committee has yanked that expectation away from them in a way they never expected possible. The Peace Prize counters the repeated right-wing assertions that Obama hasn't accomplished anything.The Nobel Foundation thinks he has.

The Foundation has made an important point. The Nobel Foundation has made a statement to the world that it should work towards peace, that they view such efforts as possible,  and they have stated that they believe that President Obama has articulated a way to achieve that goal. An additional effect of the award is that it has caused many of the worst the opponents of peace to declare where they stand. The government of Iran, the Taliban, and the American conservatives have all shown they do not want to work towards peace and nuclear disarmament because those efforts will interfere with what they really want. They consider their goals worth war and the threat of war. 

The award was not a celebration that peace has been accomplished. It was a statement the the Nobel Foundation thinks there is hope for peace and that Barack Obama has laid out a better path to get there. The award was a marker to show the way to peace and an encouragement to work for peace. It was a brilliant decision by the Nobel Foundation.