Daily Times

WASHINGTON: Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize may have confounded critics and created enormous expectations, but ultimately it had little influence on his refusal to get drawn into the bloodshed in Syria.

In accepting the prize on December 10, 2009, the newly elected US president gave a resolute speech about war and peace, putting forth what would become the pillars of his foreign policy.

Obama defended America’s right to wage war as morally justified and acknowledged the paradox that he was being honored a week after ordering 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan.

Accepting his prize, Obama told the gathering in Oslo, “War is sometimes necessary. Our actions matter and can bend history in the direction of justice.” The then president added that consequences must be backed by diplomacy in order to beat repression.

Norway’s Nobel committee, severely criticised for choosing a man for the Peace Prize who had yet to prove his worth, at the time praised Obama for his efforts to strengthen international diplomacy. Joseph Bahout, a visiting scholar at International Peace Research Centre in Washington, said that Obama was stepping down neither as a pacifist, nor as a warmonger.

Bahout told media, “He is a realist with a slight penchant for moralising, but he’s not an idealist.”

Bahout was of the view that Obama’s non-interventionist attitude puts him closer to Donald Trump rather than George Bush who brought the US into two wars.

Regarding the Syrian Civil War, Obama has spoken of felling responsible for the bloodshed even though the US did not fully intervene militarily in Syria. Last September, he said, “There hasn’t been probably a week that’s gone by in which I haven’t reexamined some of the underlying premises around how we’re dealing with the situation in Syria.”

However, in an interview to American media, Obama said that he did not regret his famous “red line” speech about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, which many of his opponents criticised as a failure.

Speaking about possible US military action, he warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in August 2012 that if the US saw chemical weapons being moved around or being utilised, it would be seen as a red line.

In 2013, the Syrian military used chemical weapons in an attack on rebel-controlled areas of Damascus, killing nearly 1,500 civilians, more than 400 of them children.

After a video caused outrage around the world, the United States, Britain and France prepared for imminent air strikes but Washington and London pulled back.

The United States instead reached an agreement with Russia to dismantle Syria’s chemical arsenal. However, Obama could not keep out of the war completely. In September 2014, he forged an international bombing coalition to attack the Islamic State group and other radical jihadist units in Syria while pursuing a political solution, although in vain.

But Obama’s refusal to put US boots on the ground, apart from several hundred special forces, helped give Russia the military and diplomatic upper hand.

Amy Greene, a researcher on US foreign policy at Sciences Po in Paris, sees no link between Obama’s Peace Prize and lack of intervention in Syria.

“Obama wasn’t convinced that troops on the ground would improve the situation. It was a head of state’s responsibility not to unleash Iraq take two,” Greene told media.

But under Obama, the United States has drastically stepped up its use of drone strikes in undeclared wars in Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen, killing 2,581 combatants since 2009.

Greene said, “We can be sorry that he did not close Guantanamo Bay and that he used a lot of drones but this is a president who has acted according to his principles and his doctrine.”