Kissinger helped establish a ceasefire in Vietnam (although it didn't stick). I don't know why that would be more surprising than Obama's prize. Kissinger donated the money to charity and didn't turn up to the awards ceremony, he didn't think he deserved it. I don't understand why Obama was awarded the prize at all.
According to Samantha Power's memoirs and interview, Obama and the whole Obama administration felt the same. They felt just awkward.
Power, Samantha, The education of an idealist : a memoir, ISBN 978-0-06-295650-7
>In October of 2009, I awoke to a very different form of bad news: Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Less than a year into his presidency, Obama was receiving an award previously bestowed on Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>When I relayed the news to Cass, he looked stricken, as if I had told him someone we knew had fallen ill. The choice seemed wildly premature, as well as a gift to Obama’s critics, who delighted in painting him as a cosmopolitan celebrity detached from the concerns of working-class Americans. But there was no getting around it: come December of 2009, Obama would travel to Norway to accept the most prestigious prize in the world.
>Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes, Obama’s two gifted speechwriters, took on the difficult task of drafting the Nobel address. I popped into Jon’s tiny office on the first floor of the West Wing, and he told me that the President had decided to directly confront the awkwardness of receiving the prize so early in his presidency. He also wanted to frame the speech around the more profound irony of winning a peace prize at the very time he was deploying 30,000 additional soldiers to Afghanistan, augmenting the force of over 67,000 US troops already there.
To me it feels like the Norwegians were also fanboying (and fangirling) hard over the charismatic guy. I also find him very charismatic, but hey, it doesn't influence my job and even if it does, I'm not in charge of judging who gets a globally recognized prize...
Fanboying over the promise of Obama and also over the turning away from the Bush era Project for a New American Century, which was beginning to look like a long term US plan at that point.
It looked like a promising new era and they were not the only ones swept up in that.
I think Obama was awarded the prize, basically, because he was not Bush. It was the zeitgeist of that time. We (and by we, I mean most people in the planet) were really tired of the Bush administration exploits.
Kissinger could help to establish a ceasefire in Vietnam, but it feels like the things they did in Cambodia before that, should subtract some points for a Peace Prize.
> Kissinger helped establish a ceasefire in Vietnam (although it didn't stick).
Nixon was elected in 1968 with Kissinger as his National Security advisor, and they assumed their posts in early 1969. That means he held off an immediate US withdrawal from Vietnam for 6 years - and that was the only legitimate course of action.
While it's true that he did spend time negotiating a potential cease fire / armistice, he and Nixon continued an illegitimate war of aggression in a foreign country, trying to prop up a puppet regime.
But that's not all: Kissinger initiated the US campaign in Cambodia, in which, over several years, hundreds of thousands were killed. See:
My point was that giving the prize to an American diplomat for taking a break from his collaboration with Nixon to try to end the imperialist war that we started, on terms agreeable to us, after at least a million Vietnamese people were killed, is insane. He also got behind the bombing in Cambodia as a way to force North Vietnam to capitulate to American demands. This is not a man you award a peace prize to unless your idea of peace includes Carthaginian peace.
