As with many of his major speeches, Obama's Nobel address is structured around a series of paradoxes, anomalies and conundrums: winning the prize when he's at the beginning rather than the end of his labors; accepting a peace prize when he is fighting two wars; engaging repressive regimes while supporting their people's struggles for freedom; upholding and renewing an international "architecture to keep the peace" when that architecture is "buckling under the weight of new threats"; promoting values he affirms as universal while protecting the national interest.