Here is a thoughtful review of my new book Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster by A.J. Rice.
“Why Trump the Peacemaker Won’t Win the Nobel Prize,” by A.J. Rice, American Greatness, September 15, 2020:
In this age, when it has become fashionable to hate the land of our birth and our forefathers, Robert Spencer’s new book is a bracing reminder that America has indeed been great—and can be great again.
How should we rate and rank America’s presidents? It’s not just an academic question or one for documentaries. How we rate our past presidents tells us much about the present and probably more about the future. Robert Spencer has come up with a whole new way of rating America’s presidents that deserves wide consideration. His new book, Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster, is a must-read for students of America’s present and past.
As I said, it’s not an academic question. It’s on the table today and every day. A Norwegian politician named Christian Tybring-Gjedde has just nominated President Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. The nomination shocked the establishment. But should it? It wouldn’t if they rated America’s presidents the way Robert Spencer recommends.
“I’m not a big Trump supporter,” Tybring-Gjedde explained. “The committee should look at the facts and judge him on the facts—not on the way he behaves sometimes. The people who have received the Peace Prize in recent years have done much less than Donald Trump. For example, Barack Obama did nothing.”
He’s right. Obama campaigned saying he would get American troops out of Iraq but he triggered more wars than he ever stopped. His drone strikes killed innocent civilians. He allowed ISIS to rise up, and turned Libya into a post-apocalyptic wasteland like something out of Mad Max. Obama also set Iran farther down the path toward obtaining nuclear weapons, while he lavished them with billions in untraceable cash.
How does enabling an extreme autocracy and its violent terrorist proxies, Hizballah, foster world peace? The Nobel committee never should have granted Obama that prize and should hang their heads in shame now.
Historians and the media continue to judge Obama a success, though. He won the Nobel Peace Prize, they say. The lens through which people like this view his and other presidencies may not be the right one to use.
The fact that Obama was even considered for the Nobel so early in his presidency, never mind that he won it, highlights the fact that the Nobel Peace Prize today is so hyperpoliticized that it is essentially meaningless. The Nobel Peace Prize was once rewarded for truly extraordinary achievements that brought about real and lasting peace. Think of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin first establishing peace between their warring countries, and then being honored with the Nobel in 1978. Their countries have remained at peace with each other ever since. That Nobel prize honors real peace.
Obama winning it is more akin to the “everybody gets a trophy” mentality that is ruining our country. Now the Nobel Peace Prize is given to those who share the far-Left views of those who award it, while those who stand apart from the Left’s ideological camp and yet actually work effectively to bring peace are ignored. Trump, accordingly, though he has been nominated has no chance whatsoever to win the Nobel Peace Prize, no matter how transformative his efforts to bring about the accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates are on the one hand, and between Serbia and Kosovo on the other hand, have been.
Just recently, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain announced they will allow Israeli airliners to cross their airspace, knocking down a restriction that had been in place for more than 70 years. They did this because of the Trump-negotiated Israel-UAE peace deal. Trump has built up an astounding record as the first president in decades to not involve America in a new war. But the Nobel committee is likely just to look the other way. Maybe they’ll hand Joe Biden the prize, just because.
We simply take it for granted that the gatekeepers of worldly honors are all working from far-Left perspectives, such that only Leftists are ever recognized for their contributions, no matter how spurious. This is true not just of the Nobel Prize Committee, or of European honors and awards; it is also true in the United States. The Oscars just turned themselves into quota-obsessed nose counters and will not even consider a movie for its Best Picture honor unless it meets certain arbitrary race- and gender-based criteria. As Mark Steyn noted recently, this marks the death of art in film if it stands.
The Left’s pollutive perspective has infiltrated virtually every conceivable field, even, or perhaps especially, our understanding of who we are as a people, and who we should be. As the Left steps up and more openly demonizes American heroes and paints American history as an unbroken record of racism and oppression, there is an increasingly urgent necessity for a sober, balanced view of American history, one that does not bow to the Left’s sacred cows or takes the likes of the New York Times’ biased word for it.
This is where Robert Spencer and his new book come in. Spencer’s indispensable book provides needed facts and context in the field of presidential politics, and offers a refreshingly patriotic overview of the entire trajectory of American history.
There is much more. Read the rest here.