President Barack Obama's shock Nobel Peace Prize, captured after only nine months in office, offers instant vindication for a key campaign vow -- to transform the image of the United States abroad.

Coming so early in Obama's term, it also reflects the lightning political ascent of a leader who rocketed from obscurity to the pinnacle of US power in just four years, and made history as the first US African American president.

The Nobel committee saluted Obama's work to bring people together with "extraordinary" diplomatic efforts and for settingout on the long road to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

Yet the young president's foreign policy, though a sharp turn from the swaggering US of the century', has yet to yield any major results, other than mending the US image on the world stage. Obama, 48, has vowed to talk to US enemies, though not necessarily to make concessions to them, and has set out to engage Iran, and North Korea, both of which are testing the world with their nuclear crusades.

He has vowed to end the US war in Iraq, and is currently immersed in an exhaustive policy review on whether to escalate the eight-year US war in Afghanistan, launched after the September 11 attacks in 2001.

The president has also launched a fresh US drive for peace in the Middle East, but his personality has so far been unable to make any breakthroughs in the deep distrust that lingers between Israelis and Palestinians.

Obama's political style is rooted in his own cosmopolitan personality, as the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas w ho grew up mostly off the US mainland in Hawaii anc Indonesia.