October 11, 2009
Political Science Department
Better Candidates Than Obama
Well, now that the Nobel Committee has decided that the major qualification of a peace prized laureate is being Not George Bush, I think there's a few folks worth considering, beyond those usually being mentioned.
Hell, restricted this just to folks who, like Nobel Laureate Jimmy Carter, have been President, we've got quite a few choices. I suggest the following
Bill Clinton: in the Agreed Framework, when President Clinton explored the inadequacy of remuneration for absention agreements in limiting nuclear proliferation, he expanded pioneering work beginning with Aethelred the Unready's payments to the Danes and continuing with the surprisingly un-awarded Neville Chamberlaine's work, almost a thousand years later, at the Anglo-German declaration in Munich. For this expansion on previous implementations of danegeld, Clinton is far more worthy of the Nobel than Obama.
Ronald Wilson Reagan: there are few things in modern history that have both distanced the spectre of global war and increased the opportunity for peaceful development than the collapse of the Soviet Union. While quite literally billions of people aided in that effort, the final push culminated during the Reagan administration, with the Strategic Defense Initiative, which finally forced the Soviets to spend themselves into bankruptcy and irrelevance; the fall came soon after. While, clearly, the fathers of SDI include not only General Daniel Graham, as well as Pournelle and Possony -- see the Strategy of Technology -- the final push by the Reagan administration included persuading the Saudi entity to lower oil prices, forcing the Soviets to deplete their cash reserves, rather than selling oil to enhance them, a .
Harry S. Truman: Operation Downfall would have finally ended WWII, certainly, but at a huge cost of lives, both US and Japanese. Casualty estimates for the Olympic campaign vary, but there's little reason to quibble with the Shockley estimates of hundreds of thousands of Allied deaths, and multiple millions of Japanese. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulted in roughly a quarter million deaths -- an order of magnitude smaller.
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