Trump’s Nobel Fantasies

Foreign Affairs

Trump’s Nobel Fantasies

The president hasn’t earned the peace prize he plainly craves.

President Donald Trump desperately wants the Nobel Peace Prize. His lust for the ultimate sign of international and establishment acceptance is truly cringeworthy.

Does he know whose ranks he would be joining if he received the nod of appointees by the Norwegian parliament? Many prior recipients, however worthy, are international unknowns. Other better-known awardees were unworthy. 

Consider three nods dating back to just 2007. One is the European Union, rewarded because it simply exists. Another is Barack Obama, who was anointed only a few months into his presidency because of what he represented, not for what he had done. Worse were the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former vice president Al Gore. Whatever one’s view of climate change, treating everything as a matter of “peace” violates the award’s intent. 

Among the most notorious recipients were Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho “for jointly having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam in 1973.” How’d that work out? Who in America, let alone the rest of the world, failed to recognize that the accord was designed for but one purpose, to allow President Richard Nixon to chant “Peace with Honor” as U.S. forces departed South Vietnam? Combat never ceased and two years later North Vietnamese forces collapsed a government that nearly 60,000 Americans died defending, entering Saigon on April 30, 1975, two weeks after the fall of Phnom Penh, capital of neighboring Cambodia.

Nevertheless, so great is Trump’s desire that obsequious domestic appointees and foreign officials alike now ostentatiously press his case. Winning the title of America’s Flatterer-in-Chief undoubtedly is Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy to the Mideast and Russia who so far has moved neither region closer to peace. At last month’s extended imperial audience, disguised as a cabinet meeting, Witkoff declared, “There’s only one thing I wish for: that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel award was ever talked about.” Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was equally effusive when he took a break from slaughtering Palestinians and wrote to Norway’s Nobel Prize committee: “Few leaders have achieved such tangible breakthroughs to peace in such a short time. In these times of great historic change, I can think of no one more deserving than President Trump of the Nobel Peace Prize.”

More consequential was the Pakistani government’s equally lavish nomination, issued shortly after Trump lunched with visiting General Asim Munir, Pakistan’s chief of army staff. Munir is his nation’s de facto ruler, despite its democratic patina. Trump’s irritation with India’s failure to follow suit, rather than his horror at Russia’s killing of civilians, as he claimed, likely motivated him to apply an extra 25 percent tariff on Indian goods. Reported the New York Times, in a June 17 phone call with the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, “Trump brought it up again, saying how proud he was of ending the military escalation. He mentioned that Pakistan was going to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor for which he had been openly campaigning. The not-so-subtle implication, according to people familiar with the call, was that Modi should do the same.” Alas, the latter didn’t, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Of course, Trump claims to be disinterested: “I’m not politicking for it. I have a lot of people that are.” In fact, he has played the eager suitor, making no effort to disguise his ardor for the recognition. During a phone call to Norway’s finance minister about tariffs, the president said he wanted the award. Moreover, he’s been playing the victim, repeatedly and publicly attributing his not winning the award to animus against him. Perhaps most galling for him is Obama’s admittedly unjustified award: “If I were named Obama I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds. He got the Nobel Prize. He didn’t even know what the hell he got it for.”

Why should Trump corral the prize? He explained on Truth Social, laying out his supposed achievements: 

I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for this [treaty between Rwanda and the Congo], I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the War between India and Pakistan, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the War between Serbia and Kosovo, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for keeping Peace between Egypt and Ethiopia (A massive Ethiopian built dam, stupidly financed by the United States of America, substantially reduces the water flowing into The Nile River), and I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for doing the Abraham Accords in the Middle East which, if all goes well, will be loaded to the brim with additional Countries signing on, and will unify the Middle East for the first time in “The Ages!” No, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do, including Russia/Ukraine, and Israel/Iran, whatever those outcomes may be, but the people know, and that’s all that matters to me![/BLOCK]

In none of these cases did Trump turn war into peace. He may have helped calm both New Delhi and Islamabad after the terrorist attack in Kashmir, but their relations remain incendiary, and India denied that he played a mediating role. He encouraged a better relationship between Serbia and Kosovo, rather than ended a conflict, and his effort largely collapsed when Kosovo’s president was indicted for war crimes. If the lion and lamb had lain down together, NATO troops would no longer be on station. As for Egypt and Ethiopia, reported the New York Times: “Trump’s diplomacy has done little to resolve the dispute. Ethiopia recently announced that it had completed the dam, with an official opening scheduled for next month. Egypt and Sudan continue to oppose the project, fearing it will limit the flow of water from the Nile River to their countries.” No more persuasive are several cases that he left unmentioned on Truth Social but has promoted elsewhere: Armenia–Azerbaijan and Cambodia–Thailand. Even where his administration helped deescalate conflicts, fundamental issues remained unresolved, and implementation of agreements proved halting.

More egregious are his final three claims. Trump cites the Abraham accords, which he suggests should turn the Mideast into a modern Garden of Eden, from which evil and other forms of unpleasantness will be banished forever. In fact, Israel was not at war with any of the countries which extended diplomatic recognition. In the most important cases, Israel and the Arab governments already engaged in back-channel cooperation, especially over security issues. In contrast, browbeating Sudan, then under military rule and now both wracked and wrecked by civil war, to participate was geopolitical nonsense. These agreements do nothing to promote peace. Instead, the Abraham accords were designed to strengthen Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic hold on power and legitimize his government’s annexation of the West Bank, leaving millions of Palestinians to permanently suffer under a violent apartheid occupation. 

As for Russia–Ukraine, the president has proved inconsistent, taking contradictory positions and seeking to impose his preferred settlement. To get his way, Trump has been threatening to escalate Washington’s proxy war against Russia and provide military backing to European garrisons after any agreement. Yet the greatest danger today in the Ukraine conflict is the U.S. ending up at war with nuclear-armed Russia over interests the latter views as existential. As long as President Vladimir Putin believes he is winning, he is unlikely to widen the conflict. However, with Europeans pushing Russia’s economic collapse and endorsing regime change, allied “success” could cause Moscow to strike out. 

Worse is Trump’s Israel–Iran claim. Against Tehran the Trump administration became a cobelligerent, arming Israel, greenlighting its aggression, defending it from Iranian retaliation, and then directly joining in the war. In doing so the president, who had loosed restraints on the Iranian program during his first term by foolishly abandoning the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, ended ongoing negotiations that showed promise in resolving the issue peacefully. Unfortunately, diplomacy likely is now dead: Iran would be foolish, indeed, suicidal, to trust any agreement reached with the aggressor Trump. The Netanyahu government appears to be preparing for another round and undoubtedly expects his support. 

In short, Trump has no claim to the Nobel Peace Prize. And that judgment comes before considering his direct complicity in mass killing committed by U.S. client states. During his first administration he armed and otherwise supported Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in their murderous war against Yemen, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians died. So outrageous was Washington’s policy that his State Department warned that American officials might be charged with war crimes. He further demonstrated his callousness when he protected Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman from accountability—“saved his ass,” announced Trump—for the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident. 

An even greater bar to Trump claiming the title of peacemaker is his administration’s support for Israel’s depredations in the West Bank and Gaza. The president has turned U.S. Mideast policy over to Netanyahu’s radical coalition, driven by such violent extremists as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. With the administration providing weapons, diplomatic cover, and even armed support for Israel, Trump shares responsibility for the deaths of hundreds and likely thousands of Palestinian civilians. (Admittedly, Joe Biden’s hands are even bloodier, with his shared toll in the tens of thousands.) Highlighting the outrageous nature of Trump’s claim to be a peacemaker is his nomination by Netanyahu, a war criminal who has been charged with genocide. In the Mideast Trump has consistently turned peace into war.

The president’s desperate, and almost certainly fruitless, pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize has a farcical air. Trump seemingly wants peace and was willing to criticize the atrocities of his predecessors, most notably George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq war. However, Trump is complicit in equally atrocious acts. His record suggests that he is more interested in snagging the prize than in promoting peace.

In any case, someone committed to America First and Making America Great Again should focus on fulfilling his responsibility to the United States and its people. Helping other nations make peace is worthwhile. Keeping America out of war is essential. He should concentrate on keeping this nation at peace.

The post Trump’s Nobel Fantasies appeared first on The American Conservative.