A moment comes but rarely in history when an American president invests his political capital in winning an award and gets riled when he doesn’t. Yes, we are talking about the Nobel Prize for Peace and President Donald Trump’s desire to lay his hands on it. Last week’s announcement that the award is going to Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado resulted in the White House “blasting” the Nobel committee, as the BBC put it, for putting “politics over peace”. Machado herself dedicated her award to the people of Venezuela and Trump in a post on social media platform X, which Trump reshared on his Truth Social handle. Trump also shared a comment by Russian President Vladimir Putin on the prize in which he lamented, well almost, that Trump didn’t get the award despite doing so much for world peace. Trump endorsing these views suggests that despite not winning the prized medal made of gold, he is still hankering for it.
Trump has himself made his desire for the prize known to the world several times and he hasn’t been very subtle about. He has been going on every forum, including the United Nations General Assembly, and rattling out a list of conflicts he has ended, including a short one between India and Pakistan, and another between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Trump has also been in a tearing hurry to end the war in Gaza and the Russia-Ukraine war, so much so that even before the ceasefire terms were fully discussed and agreed upon by Hamas and Israel, he announced unilaterally that the Gaza war was over. Over the summer, he telephoned Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s finance minister, in Oslo to tell him that he wanted to talk about the Nobel Peace Prize and tariffs, which the Norwegian daily Dagens Naeringsliv divulged in an exclusive report, which was cited by news agency Reuters. Trump was allegedly lobbying for the prize himself and threatening to impose tariffs on the European country if they thought otherwise. UK daily The Guardian recalled that Trump had, during his presidential campaign last year, had said, “If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel prize given to me in 10 seconds.”
Trump’s repeated claims about ending the conflict between India and Pakistan, which has embarrassed and angered Narendra Modi and his government a lot, could be seen in that context: that he was making a claim for the coveted prize and was even willing to put on the sacrificial altar America’s decades-old relationship with India for it. But world leaders seem to have figured out that the Nobel prize is Trump’s weak spot, and they could use it to their advantage. Or, as the BBC noted in a recent article: “World leaders appear to have realised Nobel flattery is a way to his heart.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded that Trump be given the prize, and so has Pakistani PM Shahbaz Shareef, who on Monday, reiterated his Nobel demand for Trump while speaking at the world leaders’ conference at Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh, where Trump announced that he had achieved peace in Gaza, and almost every other world leader present there nodded in agreement. In this list, we could add Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney too, who may not have argued for a Nobel for Trump, but who has been nodding in agreement that he was the catalyst for peace in Gaza for some time now.
On Friday, our host Paul Brar, did a special segment on this and passionately argued that Trump deserved the Nobel. He was joined by a section of Sher-E-Punjab’s esteemed listeners as well. You can watch that segment here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_d5Hp8EBIs
However, several internationally renowned historians and political scientists argued that Trump doesn’t deserve a Nobel. USA Today put together an article on this, and also recalled that the Norwegian Nobel committee has made several bad decisions on the award in the past.
India’s commentariat also weighed in on this, and one argument that many perceptive commentators gave against Trump was that someone who renamed the US Department of Defense as Department of War isn’t exactly a mascot of world peace.