Another effort is afoot to get inside a president’s head with a Nobel Peace Prize. It worked out very poorly the last time, when the leftist Norwegians who dole out the award gave it to Barack Obama before he had done a single thing. And the continuing chatter about President Trump winning the prize can only lead to something very, very bad, like a dangerously flawed deal with North Korea. As Trump heads off to Singapore to negotiate with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, it’s time to silence such talk.
Preemptively awarding to Obama the Nobel Prize was not some quirky indulgence. It was a brilliant effort by Norwegian peaceniks to put themselves in charge of U.S. foreign policy. The Nobel Peace Prize committee in Oslo put the medal around Obama’s neck. And then they used it to tie his hands.
It’s impossible to tell the extent to which Obama’s disastrous foreign policy was the result of the expectations placed on him by winning the peace prize or his own inner Neville Chamberlain. But the results are there for all to see: A red line drawn in Syria on the use of chemical weapons and then a pusillanimous retreat from vows to do something about it, accompanied by a decision to invite the Russians back into the Middle East; a “peace” deal with Iran that allows the ayatollahs a green light to restart their nuclear program by the end of the next decade; a failure to provide enough troops to finish the Afghan war; neglect of the rising ISIS threat until it had swept across Mesopotamia; normalized relations with the Cuban dictatorship with little to show for it in return; misjudgment of the threat from Russia; using just enough military might in Libya to leave it an anarchic playground for Islamists; and yes, craven acquiescence to North Korea’s nuclear buildup that kicked the can down the road to Trump.
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