The Norwegian Storting is due to announce on Friday the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Sun is rooting for GI Joe. There are a lot of great heroes in the long struggle for peace on our troubled planet. It’s hard, though, to think of anyone who has stood for peace more courageously, more selflessly, in more theaters, and over a longer period of time than the men and women who have appeared in arms in the American uniform.

This idea caught the imagination of the editors who conduct this column back in the 1990s, when the Forward newspaper issued an op-ed article by a professor in New Jersey, Neil Kressel. One of the points made by the patriotic professor is that many of the Nobel laureates in peace had gained the prize by leaving the dark side and coming over to the side of peace — Mikhail Gorbachev, say, or Anwar Sadat, or F.W. de Klerk.

One of the things that Mr. Kressel reckoned makes the American GI so special, though, is that he has stood on the right side of history for generations. Mr. Kressel’s op-ed piece in the Forward was reprinted in the American Legion magazine. The Forward itself reissued the editorial several times as the Norwegians began their deliberations. The New York Sun began nursing the idea 20 years ago, not long after the paper was relaunched in print.

The Sun’s first editorial on this head was issued on October 3, 2003. We noted at the time that there were, as there are today, a number of magnificent candidates for the prize, including — at the time — a dying Catholic pope, John Paul II, or a Chinese electrician, Wei Jing Sheng, who’d greeted the communist program known as “Four Modernizations” with a poster called “The Fifth Modernization, Democracy.”

Today the heirs to the Fifth Modernization are the courageous pro-democracy protesters of Hong Kong and their heroic supporter, the newspaper baron Jimmy Lai, now in a jail in Hong Kong. He and they would be great candidates for the Nobel Prize in Peace. We tend to see the American GI as standing for the same principles of democracy that they do. How nice it would be to discover one year that the Storting itself has awakened to this idea.