Obama's 'unclenched fist' won the prize

[babylonsister]

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/10/09/clemons.obama.peace.world/

Obama's 'unclenched fist' won the prize

By Steve Clemons
Special to CNN


Steve Clemons says the Nobel panel correctly decided Obama's approach to diplomacy holds great promise.


WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Cynics will say that Oslo was jealous that Copenhagen, Denmark, scored a visit from President Obama, and giving him a Nobel was the only way to get him to Norway.

But the Nobel Committee's decision to make Obama the only sitting U.S. president since Woodrow Wilson to receive the Nobel Peace Prize shows the committee's clear-headed assessment that Obama's "unclenched fist" approach to dealing with the world's most thuggish leaders has had a constructive, systemic impact on the world's expectations of itself.

Obama has helped citizens all around the world -- including in the United States -- to want a world beyond the mess we have today in the Middle East and South Asia. They want a world where America is benign and positive, and where other leaders help in supporting the struggles of their people for better lives rather than securing themselves through crude power.

Obama has found a way in this interconnected world of cell phones, Twitter, Facebook and other social networking to reach a majority of the world's citizens with his message of hope for a better world. He speaks past the dictators to regular people and has, on the whole, raised global political expectations about everything from climate change to nuclear nonproliferation in ways that no one in history has done before.

snip//

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.

Obama will still make mistakes. Leaders will still wrestle with him. Hard choices and the gravity of war will still generate challenges for Obama's leadership.

But 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.

[PretzelWarrior]

1. WTF? They gave the peace prize to him because they were jealous of Copenhagen?

god, that is too stupid to even include in a legitimate news piece but of course we are all on to CNN now.

[babylonsister]

2. Did you miss the first part of that sentence-"cynics will say", i.e., r/w

crazies?