“The Nobel Peace Prize is the only one that is awarded not for solving a problem but for merely trying to. Sometimes, the hope expressed by the Nobel committee is realized—as it was by Nelson Mandela and Frederik Willem de Klerk, for example, in 1993. Just as often, the prize ends up honoring an illusion—Yasir Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin, in 1994—or a cause that’s as hopeless as it is noble: the Dalai Lama, in 1989; Aung San Suu Kyi, in 1991.