Nobel Peace Prize awarded to President Barack Obama

US President Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize for giving the world "hope for a better future" and striving for nuclear disarmament. The decision to award one of the world's top awards to a president less than nine months into his first term, who has yet to score a major foreign policy success, came as a major surprise. The Nobel Committee in Oslo praised Obama for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

The citation reads: “Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations…For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman.”

Obama’s main foreign policy initiatives included dealing with Iran's disputed nuclear program and and the stalled Middle East peace process. Real progress, however, has so far not been forthcoming, and Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Thursday there was no chance of a peace deal for many years to come.

The chief Palestinian peace negotiator, Saeb Erekat, welcomed the award to Obama. "We hope that he will be able to achieve peace in the Middle East and achieve Israeli withdrawal to 1967 borders and establish an independent Palestinian state on 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital," he told the news agency ‘Reuters’. In Gaza, however, Islamic Jihad leader Khaled Al-Batsh condemned the Nobel Committee’s decision. "Obama's winning the peace prize shows these prizes are political, not governed by the principles of credibility, values and morals. Why should Obama be given a peace prize while his country owns the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth and his soldiers continue to shed innocent blood in Iraq and Afghanistan?"

Obama is the third American leader to win the Nobel Peace Prize this decade after former Vice-President Al Gore won it in 2007, along with the UN climate panel, and former President Jimmy Carter in 2002.