While I still hope Obama’s team will tell him to turn down the Nobel Peace Prize (see my earlier post), that now looks unlikely.His initial reaction doesn’t leave much wriggle room (“humbled to be selected” etc). Given that he was woken in the early hours to be told the news, one wonders whether this was the 3 am call that Hillary tried to warn us all about.

So let’s look forward to Obama’s December, which could progress along two dramatically different paths. Here’s the key dates:

December 7: Copenhagen climate summit opens.

December 10: 300 miles away, Obama arrives in Oslo to give his Peace prize acceptance speech.

December 16: Copenhagen’s high level segment starts (the bit Ban-Ki Moon, Ministers and some heads of state pitch up for – Gordon Brown is confirmed, other are under pressure to turn up).

December 18: Copenhagen concludes – with a deal (triumphant headlines) or no deal (major league acrimony).

So by Christmas, two scenarios – one that will see the President attain mythical status before his first anniversary in office; the other will fuel claims that he is already a busted flush:

Obama’s best case: Health care passed. Nobel prize accepted to great acclaim. Climate change deal sealed (now an outside chance, that is certain to require Obama’s personal intervention).

His worst case: No health care. Copenhagen talks have collapsed. Remorseless mockery for Obama’s Nobel. The IOC’s snub to Chicago’s Olympics dream (also delivered in Copenhagen) now seen as portent for what was to come.

So hold tight Mr President. December is going to be quite a ride.

Early reactions to Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize are almost universally negative. I agree. The decision is absurd.

I’d love to be in the White House now. How does the President react? What can he possibly say that won’t make him look vain and narcissistic? Also – when was he informed? Did his team know this was coming? Was there anything they could do to head it off?

If I was one of his advisers, I’d currently be writing a speech that started something like this:

Today, the Nobel Peace Prize committee made a decision that places an enormous, but welcome, burden on my shoulders. They hope that I can be part of a new global effort to achieve a nuclear free world. This goal is of paramount importance to our future, and that of our descendants, and I would like to thank the committee for recognizing that fact.

There is still a great deal of work to be done, however. We are at the beginning of what will be a long and difficult journey. That is why, after much soul searching, I have decided that I must decline the honour that has been offered to me and ask that it be awarded to a more deserving beneficiary – one whose contribution to peace is in the past, not the future.

Perhaps, in ten, twenty or thirty years’ time, I will be truly worthy of a prize that has such an illustrious history. Today’s news has inspired me to redouble my efforts to make sure that is the case.

Update: Loren Feldman: “In office for 11 days when nominations closed. The fix was in. A sad day for the whole world. Shameful.”

Update II: Just done an interview for ABC News on why Obama should decline. Cashewman is thinking along similar lines.

Update III: This tweet seems to be going viral: “BREAKING NEWS on Obama’s Nobel prize. Turns out it was awarded for making peace with Hillary Clinton.”

Update IV: Looks like he’s going to accept it – big big mistake, I say:

U.S. President Barack Obama felt humbled to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a senior administration official said.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs called before dawn and woke Obama with the news that he had won the prestigious honor which was announced in Oslo at 5 a.m. EDT (0900 GMT). “The president was humbled to be selected by the committee,” the official said.

When told in an e-mail from Reuters that many people around the world were stunned by the announcement, Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, responded, “As are we.”

Update V: Here’s an interesting wrinkle. Obama will be accepting his Nobel Prize in Oslo on December 10, just as the climate talks get under way a few hundred miles down the road in Copenhagen.

Tumultuous times for the dollar this week. Gold has hit an all-time high three days in a row (this morning it’s at $1,045  troy ounce – it was only $990 on 29 September) while WTI oil is up at $71.50 a barrel todaycompared to $66 just over a week ago – both commodities head upwards when the greenback’s going the other way. So what was going on? Over to the NYT for the stocks and bonds report in Wednesday’s paper:

Investors clamored to buy pretty much anything on Tuesday — as long as it was not the dollar. A seven-month slide in the value of the dollar gained force as investors migrated to other markets and fretted over a report that crude oil could one day be priced in other currencies, hobbling the dollar’s role as a vehicle for global trade.

Whatever would give investors that idea, you wonder? Answer:

A report on Tuesday in The Independent, a British newspaper, suggested that China, France, Japan and Russia were in secret talks with Persian Gulf countries to abandon the dollar for international trade in oil and replace it with a basket of currencies and gold.

The Independent? Not the FT, not the WSJ, but the Independent? Yup, the FT’s Alphaville blog says so too:

The Independent appears to have rocked the world on Tuesday with its Robert Fisk exclusive exposing a secret plot by international central banks to topple the US dollar.

So what on earth did he say that managed to move markets on the other side of the Atlantic?

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From Martin Wolf in the FT.

OK, here’s the EU’s strategy for Somalia: (1) pay our African allies to put their troops in the line of fire; (2) cut off the money over accounting issues; (3) er…

The European Union has suspended its financial support to African Union peacekeepers in Somalia over the delay by the continental body to account for the past funds, the Defence Minister, Dr Crispus Kiyonga, has said. The suspension has left the peacekeepers composed of Ugandan and Burundian forces in Somalia without operational allowances for the last three months.

However, Dr Kiyonga on Wednesday told Ugandan peacekeepers who returned from Somalia three weeks ago, that the matter will be resolved soon. “We owe you some money. The delay was caused by African Union because the donors have withheld the money due to accountability issues,” Dr Kiyonga told the soldiers in Mubende.

Another triumph for bean-counting over strategy. And then there’s the scurvy.

The minister also said that findings by the World Health Organisation investigation into the causes of the strange ailments that killed two Ugandan peacekeepers indicated that the deaths were caused by malnutrition and not poison as the Al-Shabaab rebels had claimed.

“The investigations indicate that it was lack of VitaminB1 in the food they were eating. But now soldiers are getting sufficient fresh fruits, a move that will prevent recurring of such ailments,” he said.

If we can’t send peacekeepers cash, perhaps we could at least send oranges?

- With the eighth anniversary of war in Afghanistan, debate about the strategic direction of the conflict continues apace. Foreign Policy has an extract from Gordon M. Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster – chronicling the key turning points of the Vietnam war and reportedly forming required reading in the current White House. Over at the New Republic, William Galston argues that General McChrystal was right to air his concerns about Afghan strategy in public and ratchet up pressure on President Obama.

- RUSI, meanwhile, assesses the issue of troop numbers on British shores, viewing the commitment to hard power through the lens of the country’s world role. In related news, the Conservatives are set to confirm that General Sir Richard Dannatt, recently retired as Chief of the General Staff, is to advise them on defence policy.

- Elsewhere, Professor John Merriman asks if the bombing of a Paris café at the end of the 19th Century spawned terrorism in its modern form. Current policy, he suggests, would do well to take better account of historical experience.

- Finally, with the slew of annual awards from the Nobel committee well under way, attention turns to possible winners of the economics prize – to be announced on Monday.  Thompson Reuters offers its annual, citation-based, predications here. Brad DeLong, meanwhile, suggests that this year’s gong should go to Mark Gertler and current Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke.

Honestly, how tedious enthusiasts for European integration are – almost as tedious as avowed Eurosceptics, in fact. Despite the fact that Euro-cheerleaders were among the biggest critics of President Bush’s ‘with us or against us’ approach to foreign policy, they seem wholly unable to recognise their own indulgence in the same fault when it comes to people’s views on the benefits of further European integration.

Case in point: the sources cited in today’s FT by Tony Barber, the paper’s excellent Brussels columnist, who writes that

Many on the Continent see [Euroscepticism] as a British identity problem that extends beyond some acute nervous condition of the modern Tory party. The UK, they say, is already a semi-detached player in Europe. It defends the City of London, but does not join the eurozone; it shapes EU foreign policy, but stays out of the Schengen border-free travel regime; it signs the Lisbon treaty, but secures opt-outs on justice and home affairs. No other EU member-state is so standoffish.

Oh for heaven’s sake. As I noted here a few days ago, I’m pleased that Lisbon finally looks set to enter into force because I think Europe badly needs to raise its game on foreign policy coherence. I’m a big enthusiast for the single market, and a fan of what Europe has achieved on climate change. But why does it follow on that I should be a supported of every possible facet of European integration? (more…)

So you thought that the Pittsburgh G20 summit had buried the G7/G8?  Not quite yet…

Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg prime minister who chairs meetings of the eurozone finance ministers, has responded sharply to suggestions from Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that the Group of Seven advanced industrial countries might no longer play a leading role in international economic policy diplomacy.

“We do not want the G7 to be brought to an end,” Juncker said at this year’s annual meetings in Istanbul of the World Bank and the IMF, the government-owned institutions that have been helping to finance the recovery from the global economic crisis. “We think that the G7 is the best place to discuss currency issues,” Juncker said.

His remarks followed comments earlier by Strauss-Kahn which added to persistent behind-the-scenes Anglo-American sniping at the G7. After the meeting of the G20 developed and developing countries in Pittsburgh on September, some countries were suggesting that the G7 should give way to the G20 for international economic policy discussions because the former excludes the increasingly influential emerging market economies China, India and Brazil. Strauss-Kahn referred to the G7 as “perhaps the late G7″, implying that he also questioned the validity of the group as a meaningful venue for international economic policy debate.

This sort of to-and-fro may go on for a while yet, as European leaders attempt to maintain the privileged status of the G7/G8 to counter-balance the rise of the G20…

Reading the papers over breakfast in Lahore, I was dumbfounded by the story of a US diplomatic official being attacked while she attempted to distribute – personally! – aid to a hundred or so Christians who have been victims of communal violence.

Sitting on a stage, Carmella Conroy, who heads the US consulate in Lahore, kicked off proceedings by presenting a relief package to Shahbaz Hameed.

Hameed, who saw 7 members of his family burnt alive in Gojra after an alleged desecration of the Koran, was not happy. He refused the aid, saying that Christians needed not food, but justice. A minor riot ensued, with the crowd throwing aid parcels back at Ms Conroy.

This story seems wrong in so many ways.  Does USAID really see its job as spinning charity into PR opportunities (and doing so hamfistedly)? And is the US’s mission in Pakistan to act as a defender of the Christian faith? It certainly seems that way when you read the newspaper report. (more…)

Deutsche Bank have good news and bad news, as the Wall Street Journal’s excellent Environmental Capital blog recounts:

Here’s an intriguing thought: Global oil supplies are indeed set to peak within a few years, and no, that is not bullish for oil. Quite the contrary—it will spell the end of the “oil age.”

That’s the take from Deutsche Bank’s new report, “The Peak Oil Market.” In a nutshell: The oil industry chronically under invests in finding new supplies, exemplified both by Big Oil’s recent love of share buybacks and under-investment by big oil-producing nations. That spells a looming supply crunch.

That will send oil to $175 a barrel by 2016—and will simultaneously put the final nail in oil’s coffin and send prices plummeting back to $70 by 2030. That’s because there’s an even more important “peak” moment on the horizon: A global peak in oil demand. That has already begun in the world’s biggest oil-consuming nation, Deutsche Bank notes:

US demand is the key. It is the last market-priced, oil inefficient, major oil consumer. We believe Obama’s environmental agenda, the bankruptcy of the US auto industry, the war in Iraq, and global oil supply challenges have dovetailed to spell the end of the oil era.

The big driver? The coming-of-age of electric and hybrid vehicles, which promise massive fuel-economy gains for short-hop commuting but which so far have not been economic.

Deutsche Bank expects the electric car to become a truly “disruptive technology” which takes off around the world, sending demand for gasoline into an “inexorable and accelerating decline.”

There’s recently been a small flurry of pieces warning that transatlantic relations are starting to sour (again).  First up, the Economist:

A “flashing yellow light”. That is how one American official describes warning signs of trouble between his administration and Europe. Less than a year after Barack Obama’s election, European euphoria over the end of the Bush era is fading. Relations are still far better than in the dark days before the Iraq war. But as the official puts it, there is “a lot of sniping” going back and forth across the Atlantic. And, he adds, there is a recognition at the “highest levels” that such snippiness is becoming unhelpful.

European Union politicians and officials are dismayed that, with a poisonous debate over health reform chewing up his political capital in Congress, Mr Obama may not secure legislation fixing binding emissions targets for America before the climate-change summit in Copenhagen in December. They also think the health-care impasse explains the lack of progress on the Doha world-trade talks. Nor did Europeans enjoy the G20 meeting that Mr Obama hosted in Pittsburgh. Despite hogging a ludicrous number of seats at the table, the EU came away with only one big Europe-specific agreement: alas, for them, it was a plan to cut their voting power at the IMF.

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So there I am on a long plane flight home, in need of something to watch. Hailing as I do from the Global Dashboard stable, the preferred option was clear: a disaster movie. And lo, what should be playing on BA routes this month but the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

My expectations were along the lines of I am Legend or The Day After Tomorrow. You know how it goes: massive catastrophe, civilisation collapses, a veritable smorgasbord of SFX, a couple of doughty folk live to fight another day, and (as the credits roll) the prospect of a gradual rebuild.

As it turned out, this was not the case.  In a nutshell: Keanu Reeves is an alien. He has been sent here by a confederation of highly evolved alien civilisations to “save the earth” – by wiping us out, given that we’re cheerfully running our own mass extinction event. Pretty scientist Jennifer Conolly, initially part of the US government scratch team of scientists (“We need you to come with us right away, ma’am. It’s a matter of national security”) comes to befriend the alien, and must persuade him of humanity’s case; and so it goes for the next hour or two.

Where it gets fun, though, is when she takes Keanu to see her mentor, a Nobel Prize-winning uber-scientist – played, somewhat improbably, by John Cleese – whereupon the following dialogue ensues:

Boffin: Well, there must be alternatives. You must have some technology you have that could solve the problem.

Alien: The problem is not technology. The problem is you. You lack the will to change.

Boffin: Then help us change.

Alien: I cannot change your nature. You treat the world as you treat each other.

Boffin: But every civilisation reaches a crisis point eventually.

Alien: Most of them don’t make it.

Boffin: Yours did. How?

Alien: Our sun was dying. We had to evolve in order to survive.

Boffin: So it was only when your world was threatened with destruction that you became what you are now.

Alien: Yes.

Boffin: Well, that’s where we are. You say we’re on the brink of destruction, and you’re right.  But it’s only on the brink that people find the will to change; only on the precipice that we evolve. This is our moment – don’t take it from us. We are close to an answer.

That’s right, readers: I spent ten minutes doing pause and rewind on British Airways’ crappy touch screen entertainment system, juggling a laptop and an economy class meal, and I did it all for you. Why, you ask? Because when was the last time you saw a movie that expounds the necessity of crisis for global-level non-zero-sum co-operation – and uses Basil Fawlty to do so?

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