Tag: Nobel Peace Prize

  • Peace in Our Time?

     

    South Korean President Moon Jae-in is reportedly among those who say President Trump deserves to win a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the nail-biting stand-off with Kim Jong-un. But I think it’s Moon who should get the award.

    While Trump and Kim screamed threats and insults at each other, Moon skillfully coaxed North Korea’s  Dear Leader to the bargaining table. And Moon pushed all the right buttons. (Kim and Moon embrace in photo.)

    Moon used Kim’s love of sports to win him over, inviting North Korea to participate in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. And he acted like a reassuring adult instead of  ranting and railing like a kindergarten brat.

    You will hear that Trump’s bluster and the imposition of ever-harsher sanctions brought Kim to heel. But I doubt that very much.

    The West has punished the North Koreans with sanctions for generations, an what has that done? It has made them even more hostile of course.

    I suspect China’s Xi Jinping worked behind the scenes to make Kim come to his senses.  The Oriental culture is older and wiser than ours. While our leaders swagger and preen, the Chinese tend to value modesty and subtlety. Xi understood how to persuade Kim to act in his own best interests, while allowing the North Korean leader to save face.

    But it will be the West’s opulence that eventually wins over the North Koreans.  Once they share in South Korea’s creature comforts they will never want to return to the austerity and near starvation they now endure. (Vietnam is an example of this kind of transformation.)

    Of course there’s a long way to go before peace prizes get handed out.  Kim’s impossible ambitions and a long history of antagonism block the path to a lasting agreement. But with Moon’s deft touch and the power of the Chinese at play, who knows what could happen?

    Anyway, the threat of an imminent nuclear holocaust seems to be averted – for now.

    The story so far

  • The Nobel Peace Prize Belongs to Barack’s Mother

    The Nobel Peace Prize Belongs to Barack’s Mother

    I have no way of knowing, of course, but I like to think Stanley Anne Dunham is looking down and smiling this morning. For, of all the improbable honors bestowed on her son, the Nobel Peace Prize would surely please her the most.

    Often, when I hear Barack Obama’s ringing rhetoric, I think of his mother, a young white woman from Kansas, with her half-black baby at a time when marriages such as hers were illegal in many American states. I think of her tutoring him by lamplight before the start of the school day, preparing him for a life of meaning and purpose. And I recall a passage in one of his books where he quotes her response to his complaints. “This is no picnic for me, either, Buster,” he remembers her saying.

    dunhamIt certainly was no picnic. This was a woman who had faith in mankind’s better angels, who tried to live according to her convictions despite the overwhelming odds against success. This was a woman who tried to make a difference, and who never gave in to despair. She kept the faith and raised her son to carry the torch of enlightenment in a dark world.

    Did she know he would go to Harvard, become an exceptional scholar and a constitutional law professor? Was she preparing him to be a senator? To be America’s first black President? Of course not. She was trying to raise a decent human being – according to her lights.

    So, when I listen to the President, and applaud the sentiments that won him the Nobel Peace Prize, I think of Stanley Anne Dunham, her difficult life and untimely death, and I wonder what she might have said if she had lived to see how things turned out.

    Sometimes, I wonder whether her son fully understood the words she drilled into him, or whether they’re just words he learned by rote.

    Granted, he is operating in a complex and corrupt environment, where hypocrisy and lies are the norm and where evil forces hold enormous power. And granted he must rely on allies who would betray him for a few pieces of silver as quickly as any Judas Iscariot. Yes, I try to understand how hard it must be to do the right thing in such an America – in such a world. But I have yet to be convinced that his actions match his words. Can Barack Obama in good conscience accept the Nobel Peace Prize and send more young Americans to kill and to die in Afghanistan? Will he smile that smile of his and say those words his mother taught him and order more air strikes against villagers across the Pakistani border?

    When he listens to the counsels of war and the self-serving lies of the military-industrial power brokers, will he pause for a moment and ask himself what his mother would say?

    Tags: Barack Obama;s mother, Nobel Peace Prize, Obama peace prize, Stanley Anne Dunham, U.S. foreign policy, U.S. politics