The Preemptive Peace Prize

President Obama now has the task of earning his Nobel Peace Prize, ex post facto.

While I take Mark Leon Goldberg's point that the award represents an affirmation of the new direction of American leadership, I still find it premature to bestow top honors when that leadership has yet to take us anywhere. Obama and his foreign policy team have spent nearly a year, since before the inauguration, laying the groundwork for a potentially-revolutionary new global role for the United States. He wasted no time in breaking from the Bush Doctrine that made Americans reviled world-wide, and deserves recognition for his handling of such a daunting task.

We have the foundation, the grounding philosophy of the Obama Doctrine -- we know broadly what he wants to do, but he has yet to show us what he is actually capable of doing. This is not his fault, of course; he hasn't even been in office for a year. I am as frustrated as anyone over the delay in the Sudan policy review, but I also recognize that such foreign policy quagmires require careful consideration.

But bestowing a Nobel Peace Prize on the promise of change seems like an opportunity wasted to elevate the hard-fought progress of other candidates* over the past year. I have little doubt that Obama would have otherwise earned the honor at some point during the course of his presidency -- another opportunity lost, perhaps, to elevate that work, if and when it happens.

To his credit, or at least according to the email sent out tonight, Obama recognizes the Nobel as a "call to action." Perhaps this will be just the kick in the pants the administration needs to show it's serious about something other than health care.

[I share the disappointment that Morgan Tsvangirai was passed over.]

[Photo of Barack Obama during his speech at the Victory Column in Berlin from Matthias Winkelmann's Flickr stream, Creative Commons license.]