The Nobel Peace Prize pretty much lost its credibility when it awarded Obama the prize back in 2008, for doing nothing more than being elected President as a man with black skin who promised "Change".
The credibility of the prize was not particularly enhanced when in 2012 it was awarded to the 500 million citizens of the European Union - although in that case, the committee had a pretty sound argument, that they had worked together to, if not resolve all differences now and forever, had at least committed to resolving them peacefully.
And now the nomination of Putin. The corrupt, quasi-constitutional shadow president of the oil kingdom of Russia. Of course, it's just a nomination. Personally, I think Edward Snowden is the probable winner (which, for him, will amount to diplomatic immunity - no small thing). And I think Snowden does deserve it, for fighting for freedom by means for which the American armed forces lack the balls.
But is Putin really so far-fetched?
Helmut Kohl liked to say that of the EU that "problems that were once resolved on battlefields, are now resolved in the halls of Brussels". To whatever extent the Europeans ever had anything material to fight over, they sure don't now. As with the removal of the Jews from their field of vision and the usurpation of world plunder by the Americans, it's easy for the Europeans to be good when they don't really have the option to be bad.
The Europeans can sit back and whine about the Jenin massacre while doing dead nothing about the Trafigura incident or Milosevic's genocides (though they were delighted to take Slobo from the Americans and make a big, pretentious show of a trial, thinking this somehow made them morally better than the people from the other side of the world who took the initiative to bring him to justice - even if the Clinton administration did it mostly for the copper and the political distraction it offered).
That's not the case with EU-Russian relations. There is, materially, still quite a bit to fight over, fundamental and material differences that aren't going to be resolved any time soon - but at least aren't translating into the Russians rolling tanks into Poland or Germany.
Russia is a country that doesn't quite accept the concept of democracy as the US and the EU do. There will be endless arguments about who should control the resources of the Ukraine, just as there have since the days of Alexander. (And it is a zero-sum game, because if the EU can get some other country's petrol and wheat on the cheap, that is a direct, immediate and enormous loss to Russia). Mutual fear and contempt between the EU and Russia and their fundamentally different political visions will remain the rule into the foreseeable future.
Yet Putin has masterfully projected a George W-esque tough-guy image to his own people while being known internationally as a phlegmatic reptile. He has satiated militant, outsized Russian pride while keeping the peace like perhaps no one else could. He has achieved a peacemaking effort in breakaway regions worthy of Nixon - backpedaling out of a fight while preventing a revolt of the hawks.
Some may ask why Russia holds onto Chechnya and other minority regions. A Russian friend enlightened me - because Russia is, like the US, a polyglot nation dominated by a particular ethnic group. If every region that wanted to leave could whenever it wanted, the country would become ungovernable. And I know many people from former Soviet republics who bereave the unity and strength that the USSR brought, use of the Russian language replaced by obscure native Turkish-Mongol tongues with a couple million speakers.
The US had a similar experience during its Civil War. Blue Americans claim the war was about slavery, plain and simple. Red Americans claim it was about states' rights. In reality, the cause of the American Civil War was neither slavery nor states' rights but the South's massive inferiority complex. (This is also why they are still obsessed with the war and waving the Stars & Bars 150 years later, while the North has moved on).
Lincoln was speaking truthfully when he said he fought the war not to abolish slavery (something he no doubt had the wisdom to appreciate was a historical inevitability that would bring with it its own host of new problems) but to preserve the Union. Lincoln did what Putin is now doing, fighting to prevent a bunch of stupid yokels from making the nation ungovernable. Putin, unlike Lincoln, has managed to hold Russia together without killing over half a million of his own people.
Putin's efforts have fallen far short of perfect. Russia is heavily reliant on oil cash, while the real economy continues to stagnate. Putin has built his political empire on the Mafia and now is completely unable to fight them (to whatever extent he might be inclined to do so). Putin is in mind, heart and soul still the KGB spook he once was; someone who cannot even conceive the notion of a truly democratic Russia.
While Putin is personally not an anti-Semite (no small achievement for a Russian leader, and it took no small courage for him to once say to a colleague at the KGB that he thought Jews were "perfectly normal people"), he did throw Khodorkovsky to the mob not because of any crimes he committed nor a desire to divest him of his wealth or power, but because he wanted to show that he was fighting the "Jews stealing Russia". But the fact remains the man has done reasonably well in balancing evil with necessity.
In style and character, Putin is deceptively similar to his colleague Obama. Both are master politicians who project an uncompromising image while being men of compromise. Both work with byzantine, dysfunctional political logjams and are reliant on the patronage of corrupt corporations, politicians, military, mafia and gestapo that they can't get rid of. Both promise change while managing at best two steps forward, two steps back. Both arouse sentiments of visceral hatred and cult-like devotion totally out of proportion to their colorless personalities and moderate inclinations.
But in the final analysis, it is Putin, and not Obama, who is the stronger leader. It is Putin, and not Obama, who has taken the political bull by the horns and managed to at least tread water. It is Putin, and not Obama, who has managed a rise in Russia's stock. And it is Putin, and not Obama, who has done more to restrain the warmongers.
If the Nobel Peace Prize is destined for men who are not saints, but flawed characters doing a respectable job of advancing the cause of peace - Putin may not be so undeserving after all.
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