Had Republican presidential candidate John McCain been elected president of the United States last November, the world would have likely been a different place today.
McCain pledged he would take a stern measure against Iran for its nuclear ambitions by threatening to launch an attack. He used a line from the Beach Boys song "Barbara Ann" to convey his message to "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran".
Call this a Freudian slip of the tongue, but if politicians should be judged from what comes out of their mouths, McCain's words were a harbinger of bad things that would come in world politics, should he have been elected president.
Imagine the feeling of relief that judges of the Nobel Peace Prize committee had when a presidential candidate as progressive as Barack Obama was finally elected president of the United States.
It only took them nine months to give Obama the prize, for what some naysayers deemed his lofty rhetoric and noble intentions rather than his actions and achievements in the first nine months of his administration.
And if we can take the words of the Nobel Committee at face value, there is only little that we can disagree with. In a very short time, Obama managed to change the tone of US foreign policy, which in turn has contributed to the creation of a less hostile environment in world politics. In the words of the Nobel committee, Obama has "as a president created a new climate in international politics".
He made a historic speech in Cairo, Egypt, trying to mend fences and rebuild ties with the Islamic world that have long been poisoned by the Bush-initiated war on terror.
Obama has used his charm to persuade the Russians to reduce their nuclear arsenal. He pledged to engage with countries considered to be US enemies, such as Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.
Iran will likely drag its feet on the nuclear issue, but the fact it is willing to sit down and talk is certainly a good sign. A meeting between Iranian officials and US diplomats is a rare occurrence considering the level of hostility between the two countries in the past.
As for detractors who deemed Obama all hot air and no substance, they should consider the success of his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in brokering a deal between the Turkish and Armenian government to end decades of acrimony over what was considered a genocide against Armenians by the Turks.
But more than anything else, Obama's coup of the Nobel Peace Prize is strong evidence that flesh-and-blood politicians matter in world politics, that individuals have the capability to change how things are going in politics, and in the grand scheme of thing, individual politicians have every power at their disposal to change the course of global politics.
In an anarchic international setting, states work according to the logic that would dictate it to seek power and security, and politicians are assumed to behave according to the logic. The same is true for those on the left. A Marxist perspective of international relations views that politicians are nothing but pawns subservient to the forces of the larger-than-life economic structure.
A liberal perspective of international relations adopts a similar dismissive view of individual actors in world politics. Institutions and ideas matter the most in deciding the actions of states. A state that possesses an effective set of institutions to control the means of violence in its sovereign territory is likely to prevail in world politics.
Contradicting basic premises of the dominant perspectives in the literature of international relations, a succession of great politicians has left its mark on world politics and changed the course of history.
The bold and swift action of US president John F. Kennedy - aided by able bureaucrats in his inner circle in the White House - prevented the world from falling into a nuclear holocaust.
In October 1962, president Kennedy made a decision to intercept the delivery of nuclear arsenal by the Soviet Union to the socialist state of Cuba, and ended a nuclear stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union.
No one could argue against the contribution of US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in ending the Cold War.
For better or worse, Indonesian transitional president B.J. Habibie has done much to change the landscape of Indonesian politics.
He, for one, helped disentangle Indonesia from many ill-advised policies of the New Order government.
His decision to grant a referendum option to the East Timorese was motivated by his Napoleonic complex of wanting to get recognition from the international community for his bold actions.
The Nobel Committee's decision to give Obama the Nobel Peace Prize is an affirmation that in the final analysis, it is individual politicians, rather than some faceless institution or leviathan that is the economic force, that makes decisions affecting billion of lives on the planet.
It is the actions of the individual that make world politics interesting to watch, and with an inspiring politician like Obama, it will surely be more interesting in years to come.
The author is a staff writer at The Jakarta Post.
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