Barack Obama: President and Nobel Peace Prize Winner
By Jason Sibert
United States politics has produced several individuals who value an internationalist outlook in one way or another.
Former President Barack Obama represents that sort of thinking. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. The Nobel committee stated that he won “for his efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation amongst peoples.” Obama was one of four presidents, the others being Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jimmy Carter, to win the prize. A total of 21 Americans won the Nobel Peace Prize.
After President George W. Bush’s unilateral invasion of Iraq, Obama took a different direction. He tried to strengthen America’s alliances, entered the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to control Iran’s nuclear arsenal, and entered the Paris Climate Accords to manage the global warming problem. However, Obama made the decision to invade Libya, which some term a small-scale Iraq, and our country continued its policy of dominating the world through a network of military bases to keep rising powers from assuming a bigger role on the world stage. President Obama started the Quadrilateral Security Dialog, an alliance with India, Japan, and Australia, to contain China. This set off a power-balancing act on the part of China.
Obama graduated from high school in 1979 and from Columbia University in 1983. He worked for about a year at the Business International Corporation in New York where he was a financial researcher and writer and then as a project coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group on the City College of New York campus for three months in 1985.
Two years after graduating from Columbia, Obama moved from New York to Chicago where he was hired as director of the Developing Communities Project, a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Roseland, West Pullman and Riverdale on Chicago’s South Side. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988. He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants’ rights organization. Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.
Obama graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991 and then returned to Chicago. He served as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004 and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004. Obama was elected president in 2008 and served in the office from 2009 to 2017.
Jason Sibert is Executive Director of the Peace Economy Project.
