As the AP analysis this morning puts it, “But still … ?”

In other words, really? Barack Obama? Nobel Peace Prize? So soon? Nine months? War still going in Iraq? Global Warming legislation bottled in Senate? Iran still defiant? Afghanistan still in need of more U.S. troops?

Well, it may seem shocking to Americans, pleasantly for some, disturbingly for others. But in fact, as Ronald Krebs explained in Foreign Policy, the Peace Prize has often been given for aspirational reasons, for potential achievements in the future as much as actual achievements from the past. This is decidedly different from other Nobel prizes, like literature, economics or medicine.

The Nobel Peace Prize’s aims are expressly political. The Nobel committee seeks to change the world through the prize’s very conferral, and, unlike its fellow prizes, the peace prize goes well beyond recognizing past accomplishments. As Francis Sejersted, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in the 1990s, once proudly admitted, “The prize … is not only for past achievement. … The committee also takes the possible positive effects of its choices into account [because] … Nobel wanted the prize to have political effects. Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act.”