Now that all the gasps of What? and Why? have been heard regarding the Nobel Peace Prize going to President Obama, the decision of the five Norwegians who made it now looks more and more like a public relations coup.

While the surprise selection on the surface may come off as an early visit of Santa Claus to the White House, it also has been widely read as the voice of Europe expressing appreciation for America's return to the community of nations.

Just why it should be assumed the quintet of Scandinavian judges speaks for the rest of the Old World continent is a bit of a mystery, but that indeed seems to be the case. In any event, the message conveyed is clear enough.

The citation said the prize was given to Obama for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples" and for his "vision and work for a world without nuclear weapons."

But in personal terms, as illustrated in the Nick Anderson cartoon pictured above showing Obama wearing a medal reading "Nobel Not-Bush Prize," it represents a collective sign of relief across Europe that George W. has been retired to his Texas ranch.

This, of course, was not the doing of Barack Obama, inasmuch as Bush was already term-limited and would have been gone whether or not Obama was elected. And John McCain, for all the Democratic efforts to paint him as a mere extension of Bush, was hardly that.

Bush's departure is seen in foreign eyes as an end to the American unilateralism that led to the invasion of Iraq under cover of that ersatz "coalition of the willing," and all that happened in U.S. foreign policy thereafter. From European shores, the Americans' election and reelection of the swaggering, unpolished Bush was always itself a mystery.

So Obama has been cast by the optimistic Nobel judges as a savior of sorts well before he has had the time to save his country, no less Europe and world, from anything yet.

In this sense, however, the prize is some evidence that the new American president has already demonstrated progress on one campaign promise, to combat the hate-America sentiment that grew in Europe in the George W. Bush years.

Americans here at home are more concerned now with Obama's failure to slow the rate of unemployment and with his seeming difficulty in getting all he wants from a Democratic Congress. But the view from Europeans is focused, not surprisingly, on how he is dealing with them. His own early visits to the continent, and those of his vice president and secretaries of state and defense all encourage the notion that the Bush unilateralism is out.

That Obama has taken a long time deciding on what to do about the bid for more troops to Afghanistan sends another signal of fresh thinking on foreign policy in the Oval Office that is welcome abroad.

But it will take much more than a medal from Scandinavia to dig Obama out of the multiple deep challenges confronting him in his first year as president. The mockery from conservative political leaders and talk-show commentators is already well under way about winning a peace prize while running two wars and considering broadening the troop commitment in one of them.

Just as too much was made of Obama's ill-conceived rush to Copenhagen and failed attempt to bring the 2016 Summer Olympics to Chicago, so too is casting the award of the Nobel Peace Prize as either a tremendous boost to him or a fiasco subjecting him to politically damaging ridicule.

If another set of Nobel Prize judges could award the honor to Henry Kissinger in 1973 for negotiations to end the Vietnam War that didn't, giving it to Obama based on the hope he can make America a better and wiser partner in the world community may not be such a stretch. Only time and the vagaries of foreign policy will tell.

Reach Jules Witcover column by e-mail at juleswitcover@earthlink.net.