Obama: Keep Aiming High

Responding to his winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama said he was "both surprised and deeply humbled". His demonstrable achievements were indeed fewer than his less tangible accomplishment of shifting the terms of the debate on a huge number of global peace and security issues. Still, in the business of foreign affairs, moving from clearly ineffective confrontation to possibly positive engagement in itself was a tremendous feat.

But humbled or no, Obama should now continue to aim high. In fact, he should set his sights on the extraordinary: a second Nobel Peace Prize.

This time, it will have to be based on his creating new realities rather than new rhetoric alone in three particular fields: conflict resolution, conflict management and conflict prevention.

For the first, the of the list is the Middle East, where Obama is clearly in a race against time to ensure the flood of high expectations doesn't evaporate in the regular drought of debilitating scepticism. A high-level political process between Israelis and Palestinians won't be enough. There have to be visible steps on the ground that improve people's lives -- opening checkpoints and ending rocket attacks to name just two -- so people on both sides see immediate dividends and buy into the process.

With the second, conflict management, Obama should focus on Afghanistan, where the presidential election resulted in a massive loss of credibility for the executive and the political order generally. There are no quick fixes on the route to stability, but reforming state institutions and establishing genuine constitutional governance must be the top priority if the rot is to be halted and the insurgency stemmed.

Finally, conflict prevention is the goal in Sudan, which is dangerously close to returning to a civil war that killed millions. The peace deal that ended north-south fighting in 2005 delayed the key issue of secession by Southern Sudan, but the January 2011 poll is now fast approaching, as is a contentious general election in 2010. The US an the international community generally have to help shepherd the process through to a stable outcome, while at the same time resolving Darfur and dealing with a president indicted for war crimes.

That is not a small or simple list, but as a set of achievements in international peace and security, it would put Obama in good position to own a handsome pair of Norwegian bookends.