By Andrew Hunt

The Norwegian Nobel committee’s decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama left many around the world scratching their heads, wondering why a leader who has not been in the White House for an entire year received the prize.

I admit that even though I think highly of Obama, I wondered about the wisdom of the decision.

But after surveying some of the past American recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, I concluded Obama is every bit as deserving — if not more so — as many of them.

Consider the first American to receive the prize, Theodore Roosevelt. He was given the prize in 1906 for his efforts to mediate an end to the Russo-Japanese War, which had been raging between Russia and Japan in Manchuria and on the high seas around Korea and Japan since 1904.

Roosevelt’s efforts to negotiate peace between Japan and Russia were laudable. But he was hardly a man of peace.

In the late 19th century, he pushed his nation into the unnecessary Spanish-American War (“This country needs a war,” he wrote in 1895), and he supported the savage repression of Filipino rebels when American armed forces occupied the Philippines at the turn of the century.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Roosevelt supported a series of disastrous American interventions in Latin America that ushered in decades of dependence, military dictatorships and civil wars in that part of the world. Toward the end of his life, Roosevelt was an enthusiastic backer of American entry into the First World War.

It would be absurd to argue that Theodore Roosevelt deserved the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 and Obama does not today.

And what about some of the other dubious American Nobel Peace Prize laureates? President Woodrow Wilson received it in 1919 for his role in founding the League of Nations, a United Nations-style intergovernmental organization that was so ineffectual his own country did not join it. Throughout his presidency, Wilson was a reckless white supremacist who always exhibited a blatant disregard for poor, developing nations.

In 1925, America’s vice-president, Charles Gates Dawes, won the award for his role in creating the Dawes Plan, a dismal attempt by the Allies to collect German war reparations after the First World War. The plan went nowhere.

In 1973, Henry Kissinger received the award for his role in negotiating an end to the Vietnam War. Yet many historians agree that Kissinger’s behind-the-scenes machinations actually prolonged the war by several years.

Did these men deserve the award more than Obama does at this moment in history?

And who today remembers the achievements of American Nobel Peace Prize laureates Elihu Root (1912), Frank B. Kellogg (1929) and Nicholas Murray Butler (1931)?

Since his inauguration in January, Obama has helped ease tensions between the United States and Islamic nations. He has already embarked on the long and painful process of scaling back the disastrous Iraq War. And he has rejected George W. Bush’s reckless unilateralism.

There have been many American recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize who richly deserved it. Civil rights movement leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., pacifist activist Jane Addams, Marshall Plan architect Gen. George Marshall, political scientist and diplomat Ralph Bunche, former president Jimmy Carter and ex-vice president Al Gore were all worthy recipients.

Obama now joins that list. He deserves the prize as much — if not more — than many of his fellow Americans who have received it in the past. The history books of the future will likely remember him as a deserving laureate.

Andrew Hunt is an associate professor of history at the University of Waterloo.