Scrap the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s an embarrassment and even an impediment to peace. President Obama, in letting the committee award it to him, has made himself look vain, a fool and dangerously lost in his own mystique.

Where do you start, in the daftness of it? Anointing a leader whose character the panel admires, but who is only a fifth of the way through his term of office and has not yet clinched any peace? The fey, fanciful lack of criteria, which does no favours to the rigorous awards in science that, unfortunately, share the same brand name?

No, start with two hard-edged points. The Peace Prize has begun to distort and damage crucial negotiations. And Obama’s acceptance of the supposed honour is a misjudgment that will give power to his critics.

Of course, there are plenty of cases — Northern Ireland, endlessly — where the advances that the prize celebrated then dissolved. Peace is not an eternal state, unshakeable once achieved. I’d put this at the heart of my queasiness about the notion of any peace prize.

But others disagree, saying that effort should be rewarded as much as solid triumph. Even so, given how muddy such efforts always are, what a jumble of motives and ugly arm-twisting before the final, tidy handshake, the Nobel committee seems naive in lauding a purity that is never there.

The real damage is done, however, by making the award to a player actively engaged in conflict resolution, which can tip the balance of power in those talks.

The worst of recent cases was the 2005 award to Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The award was odd, many thought: he had presided over a record of failure by the United Nations nuclear watchdog to detect or stop proliferation. But British and US officials working to combat Iran’s nuclear ambitions, who had long accused him of being protective of Iran, felt that the Nobel award then reinforced him in his belief that he should resist Western pressure.

In Obama’s case, two huge decisions loom: whether to put more troops into Afghanistan, and whether to mount (or even to threaten) airstrikes against Iran, if it won’t drop its nuclear work. He would surely not (we must hope) be swayed in such deliberations by the thought of jeopardy to his Norwegian garland. Yet if the Nobel Peace Prize were worth anything, then it could influence, if not constrain, people trying to broker deals.

But it isn’t worth anything. What on earth was Obama thinking when the call came through? Really, that it was an honour, not a highly partisan tribute? That it would waft him above the rancour of US politics, in which he is a hero to half the country and a communist to the rest? Hardly: his critics will just accuse him of having communist Scandinavians on his side. And they will rightly ram home the point he has missed — that the US President’s stature dwarfs that of this committee.

In the election last November, Obama won the world’s most impressive and valuable prize. The Nobel, in contrast, is as effusive and misplaced a compliment as the “my son” that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi bestowed on him last month. The only blessing of Obama’s acceptance is that he may have killed off the prize for good.

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