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After reporting the announcement that President Barack Obama will receive the Nobel Peace Prize, the mainstream British newspaper The Guardian helpfully listed all previous Nobel Peace Laureates -- except for three.

Can you guess which ones they left out? Good guess. Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Menachem Begin.

Each of the three was a co-recipient of the award. So The Guardian had to list the Arab co-recipients (Yasser Arafat, Anwar Sadat) without listing the Israelis that shared the award those years. And to top it all off, the word "Israel" was still listed in the "country" slot on each chart, proving that The Guardian's editors imported the chart and then deleted the Israeli names from the list.

After receiving complaints, the paper reinserted the Israelis.

But the larger point here is the way in which the Nobel Peace Prize is interpreted by Western countries, often representing the world's general fear and loathing of America and Israel. Most European countries think the Nobel is just grand, and that making peace is even grander, no matter the cost. It's what former Ambassador John Bolton calls "the zeal for the deal," which he warned has crept into the U.S. State Department as well.

This leads to some divergence on the credibility of the prize. Outside U.S. borders, the Nobel Peace Prize is prestigious because it represents a paramount goal of the European community: not just peace, but traveling the road to peace, which entails blending borders and adhering without exception to the doctrine of political correctness.

To a certain extent, this is understandable. Europe is made up of countries with distinct cultures. The French nation is a nation of French people; Germany is German; Italy Italian; and so forth.

This is also the reason for many foreign policy decisions. A British woman once asked me why Americans take such a tough negotiating line, while Europeans seem instinctively conciliatory.

I responded by reminding her that America doesn't share borders with an equal -- or even a near equal -- ally that could easily become its foe. By contrast, ask France or Poland how they feel about sharing a border with Germany. They are, of course, all technically allies -- now. But not so long ago, and not for the first time, there was trouble among this community of nations, and mistrust is difficult to shake.

The European nations, taken together, form a jerry-rigged world power. America -- alone -- surpasses them.

Additionally, as the historian Gordon Wood writes in "Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different," Americans frequently call upon the legacy of our country's Founding Fathers to help chart future courses.

"The United States was founded on a set of beliefs and not, as were other nations, on a common ethnicity, language, or religion," Wood writes. "Since we are not a nation in any traditional sense of the term, in order to establish our nationhood, we have to reaffirm and reinforce periodically the values of the men who declared independence from Great Britain and framed the Constitution. As long as the Republic endures, in other words, Americans are destined to look back to its founding."

America's values are shaped by its founders. Those values are hostile to appeasement and deal-making for its own sake. They are also hostile to the kind of government Europe embraces, which vaguely resembles democracy, but does not in any way resemble a liberal market economy.

So in Britain, the government runs health care (death panels and all!), whereas in September half a million Americans, with no common organization, marched on Washington, D.C. to protest the proposed health care reform, believed by the majority of both its detractors and proponents to be a steppingstone to centralized health planning.

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded for espousing European values that are simply repugnant to most Americans. The Nobel committee doesn't disguise its distaste for American power or Zionism. The committee envisions the world as a potential campfire chorus.

Americans are no longer even entertained by an award that celebrates Yasser Arafat. But as The Guardian illustrates, Europe often goes further -- it only celebrates Arafat, while omitting Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, the latter of whom paid for his Nobel-winning efforts with his life.

This presents Obama with a unique challenge. The Nobel committee wants him to be Jimmy Carter, to whom it awarded a Nobel in 2002. That year, the committee explained that its decision was intended to spit on the Bush administration's efforts to secure America after European-based Islamic terrorists, inspired by Hitler and directed by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks.

The Nobel committee all but stated plainly that it gave Obama the award to encourage him to allow Iran to go nuclear, turn his back on Israel, retreat in Afghanistan, and appease the Chinese. That would all be a fitting tribute to Carter.

But the challenge is also an opportunity to explicitly avoid that path. Now is the moment for Obama to choose. He may want to consider reaching out to Gordon Wood and asking: What would the Founders do?

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.