To many Americans and others, however, the United Nations is regarded as a moral wasteland that rewards some of world's cruelest regimes with seats on its Human Rights Committee, does nothing to prevent genocides (some would way say the U.N. actually abets them), honoring tyrants, and mired in corruption.
4. "Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts."
Meaning: As the pacifist bumper sticker puts it: "War is not the answer."
Oslo's approach echoes what the British government under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain believed vis a vis Adolf Hitler. But had Hitler been confronted instead of "dialogued" with, perhaps tens of millions of innocent men and women's lives would have been spared and the Holocaust averted. Europeans tend to believe that evil regimes will act responsibly because of dialogue, not threats of force.
5. "The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations."
Meaning: We believe that a world in which no country possesses nuclear weapons will be a safer world. We believe that even though the technology to make nuclear weapons will still exist, no terrorist organization, nor any other bad people, will make such weapons.
The existence and deterrent power of nuclear weapons have probably saved as many lives as have antibiotics. As David Von Drehle writes in this week's Time Magazine, "If the Nobel committee wants someday to honor the force that has done the most over the past 60 years to end industrial-scale war, they will award a peace prize to the bomb."
6. "Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting."
Meaning: To our delight, unlike the previous president, this one believes in global warming and in changing the American economy to combat it.
The "climate change" scare has become the most effective vehicle for compelling a transformation of Western economies along the lines that left-wing environmentalists have urged for decades.
7. "Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened."
This, unfortunately, has no meaning; it is nonsense. Under Barack Obama, the United States has not been the friend of democrats around the world. America has responded weakly to the democratic movement in Iran, ended the funding of the largest pro-Iranian human rights groups in America, pressured democratic Israel, made overtures to Hugo Chavez while denying American ally and pro-democratic Colombia a free trade agreement, abandoned Honduran anti-Chavez democrats, and has obsequiously deferred to Vladimir Putin.
8. "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."
Meaning: Only very rarely does the European left have such a kindred spirit in the American presidency.
9. "His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."
Meaning: With Barack Obama, we in Europe finally have an opportunity to end American exceptionalism.
The Oslo committee's view is, tragically, true. Thanks to Barack Obama, America is for the first time is aligning its values with those of "the majority of the world's population." If you think the world's population has had better values than America, that it has made societies that are more open, free, and tolerant than American society, and that it has fought for others' liberty more than America has, you should be delighted.