Last year’s laureate, former President Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, saw the award as an endorsement of Mr. Obama’s goal of achieving Middle East peace.
“Of course, this puts pressure on Obama,” he said. “The world expects that he will also achieve something.”
The prize, announced as official Washington — including the president — was asleep, caught the White House off guard.
The first word of it came in the form of an e-mail message to the White House staff from the White House Situation Room, which monitors events worldwide around the clock, at 5:09 a.m. It carried the subject line “item of interest.”
Shortly before 6 a.m., the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, telephoned Mr. Obama, awakening him to share the news.
“There has been no discussion, nothing at all,” said the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.
The award comes at a time of considerable challenges for the president, with few sweeping achievements so far.
On the domestic front, he is pressing Congress to overhaul the nation’s health care system. In foreign affairs, he is wrestling with his advisers over how to chart a new course in Afghanistan and has been working, with little movement, to restart peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians.
The Rose Garden appearance was an example of Mr. Obama’s heavy workload; it was squeezed into a day that already included his regular intelligence and economic briefings, a private meeting with a senator, lunch with the vice president, a major speech outlining plans for a new consumer protection agency and a strategy session on Afghanistan with his national security team.
Announcing the award, the Nobel committee cited Mr. Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” and said that he had “created a new climate in international politics.”
In a four-paragraph statement, it praised Mr. Obama for his tone, his preference for negotiation and multilateral diplomacy and his vision of a cooperative world of shared values, shorn of nuclear weapons.
“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” the committee said. “His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”
The other sitting American presidents to be given the award were Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, for negotiating an end to a war between Russia and Japan, and Woodrow Wilson in 1919, for the Treaty of Versailles.
Former President Jimmy Carter won in 2002 for his efforts over decades to spread peace and development. Mr. Carter called the award to Mr. Obama “a bold statement of international support for his vision and commitment.”
Former Vice President Al Gore won in 2007, sharing the prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for his work on climate change. Mr. Gore called Mr. Obama’s award “well deserved” on Friday.
Mr. Obama has generated considerable goodwill overseas, with polls showing him hugely popular, and he has made a series of speeches with arching ambition. He has vowed to pursue a world without nuclear weapons; reached out to the Muslim world, delivering a major speech in Cairo in June; and sought to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, at the expense of offending some of his Jewish supporters.
But he has had to devote a great deal of his time to the economic crisis and other domestic issues, and many of his policy efforts are only beginning.
In addition to the challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the situation in Iraq is extremely fragile; North Korea has staged missile tests; Iran continues to enrich uranium in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions, though it recently agreed to restart nuclear talks; Israel has resisted a settlement freeze; and Saudi Arabia has refused to make new gestures toward the Israelis.
Ahmed Youssef, a Hamas spokesman, congratulated Mr. Obama but said the prize was based only on good intentions. Muhammad al-Sharif, a politically independent Gazan, was incredulous. “Has Israel stopped building the settlements?” he asked. “Has Obama achieved a Palestinian state yet?”
The Nobel committee did not tell Mr. Obama in advance of the announcement, said its chairman, Mr. Jagland. “Waking up a president in the middle of the night,” he said, “this isn’t really something you do.”
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