‘Undeserved’: 10 Years Ago, Obama Controversially Won The Nobel Peace Prize

By
Jordan Riddle
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OPINION | This article contains opinion. This site is licensed to publish this content.

Ten years ago today, former President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize from the Norwegian Nobel Committee—an action that still baffles people to this day.

Despite the president only being in his first term in office and not having yet really achieved anything, ABC News reports Obama received the award in 2009 for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

The Nobel Prize adds:

The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.

And:

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”

So, even the committee admits the award was not given for what Obama did but what they claimed he represented or would do.

In 2015, BBC reported former Nobel Committee Secretary Geir Lundestad said the award was given as an effort to embolden Obama but it “didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.”

From the report:

Geir Lundestad told the AP news agency that the committee hoped the award would strengthen Obama.

Instead, the decision was met with criticism in the US. Many argued he had not had any impact worthy of the award.

Lundestad, writing in his memoir, Secretary of Peace, said even Obama himself had been surprised.

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“No Nobel Peace Prize ever elicited more attention than the 2009 prize to Barack Obama,” Lundestad writes.

“Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake,” he says. “In that sense the committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.”

Here’s how some people online responded to the tenth-year anniversary of the award: