WASHINGTON (MCT)– President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, it was announced Friday, making him the first American president to win the award in his first year in office.
Despite his brief tenure on the job and lack of tangible achievements, the Nobel Committee said it honored Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
“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,” said Nobel chairman Thorbjoern Jagland.
Obama was notified of the surprise award at about 6 a.m. in a call from press secretary Robert Gibbs. Obama planned to make a statement in the White House Rose Garden at 10:30 EDT.
Obama becomes the fourth American president to win the award and the third to win while in office.
Theodore Roosevelt won the 1906 prize after personally interceding to negotiate a peace between Japan and Russia. Roosevelt brought the two sides to New Hampshire in September 1905 and helped negotiate a peace treaty after several weeks.
Woodrow Wilson won the 1919 prize after he pushed to create the League of Nations following World War I, traveling to Europe to personally negotiate. The U.S. Senate ultimately rejected the U.S. role, however.
After leaving office, Jimmy Carter won the 2002 prize for what the committee called decades of work. As president, Carter personally brought Egypt and Israel together for weeks of talks at Camp David, Md., that produced a peace deal. As an ex-president, he’s traveled the globe trying to promote human rights and mediate disputes.
Obama has no comparable accomplishments. He has urged peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians but has so far been rebuffed. His one measurable achievement has been to improve the U.S. standing in the world as measured by polls in foreign countries, particularly after reaching out to the Muslim world in several speeches, including one from Cairo, Egypt.
“The prize signals that America is definitively back in the world’s good graces and the president deserves full credit for that,” said Martin Indyk, vice president and director for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, a former official in the Clinton administration.
“Now comes the hard part: turning goodwill into concrete results that can heal the wounds of a very troubled world. If Obama can do that he’ll deserve another Nobel.”
The prize was a surprise even at the White House.
“It’s an honor. It’s nothing anyone expected. It’s certainly nothing the president sought,” senior adviser David Axelrod said on MSNBC. “I think that he’s less interested in individual honors and this certainly is one than in advancing the causes that the were cited by the Nobel committee.”
Axelrod also said it was not known if Obama would travel to Oslo, Norway, to personally accept the award.
“This is all news to us,” he said, “so I don’t know what we’re going to do with regards to that. I would assume so, but I don’t know.”
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(c) 2009, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.