Why Trump Can’t Win the Nobel Peace Prize / Daily Telegraph 9.25
Nobody has ever lobbied as hard or as openly for the Nobel Peace Prize as Donald Trump.
Time and again he has laid claim to the world’s most prestigious humanitarian award, most recently in his address to the UN General Assembly where he asserted that he had solved seven “unendable” wars and saved millions of lives.
Sycophantic aides have rushed to support his campaign. Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary, says it is “well past time” he received it. Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, calls him “the single finest candidate since this Nobel award was ever talked about.” Marco Rubio, his Secretary of State, says that were he a Democrat “everyone would be saying ‘Well, he’s on his way to the Nobel peace prize’.”
Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, has even suggested that he deserves the Nobel prize for economics as well as peace for his “restructuring” of the global trading system through tariffs.
Assorted world leaders, realising that flattery is the way to woo this president, have joined the chorus. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu told Trump that he was nominating him for the prize when they met in July. The presidents of Gabon, Mauretania, Senegal, Liberia and Guinea-Bissau endorsed the idea when they met Trump at the White House that same month. So did the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia. Pakistan’s government formally nominated him in June.
Nor does Trump leave the matter just to acolytes. He raised it himself during a telephone conversation with Jens Stoltenberg, the former Nato secretary-general who is now the finance minister of the country that hosts the Nobel Peace Prize Institute.
He also solicited the support of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, during a telephone call in June. That effort backfired badly. Modi was outraged by Trump’s claim to have “solved” a military confrontation between India and Pakistan last May, and told him so. Trump has since slapped 50 per cent tariffs on Indian imports, his bromance with Modi has collapsed and the leader of the world’s most populous nation has instead cosied up to China.
“There’s no doubt the level of attention and focus is higher this year than any other we can remember,” Jorgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee which awards the prize, agreed in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.
“Never before has any person campaigned so openly for the prize. Nothing remotely approaches this,” says Jay Nordlinger, an American journalist and author of ‘Peace They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize’.
Nor, were Trump to win, would a recipient ever have been so controversial. Much of the world would be appalled at the honouring of arguably the most divisive figure ever to occupy the Oval Office. The uproar over the award of the 1973 prize to Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, as the Vietnam war raged would pale by comparison (Tom Lehrer called that the moment “political satire became obsolete”). Even amongst Americans 76 per cent say he does not deserve it, and one critic compared it to giving your drug dealer the Nobel prize for medicine.
Some bookmakers still make Trump the favourite. But those who understand Norway, Norwegians and how the prize is awarded beg to differ - and the ‘peace plan’ for Gaza that the President announced on Monday is unlikely to change their view. It is almost certainly too late, too vague and too prone to derailment for the Nobel committee to reconsider Trump’s claim before announcing the winner next week.
A former Nobel committee member, who declined to be named, called his chances “slim”.
Oivind Stenersen, a Norwegian historian and author of ‘Nobel: The Grand History of the Peace Prize’, says: “He has absolutely no chance at all”. Nordlinger says wryly: “Stranger things have happened - but not many.”
Even Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a former MP for Norway’s right-wing Progress Party who nominated Trump in 2020, doubts he deserves it this year. Were he to win “I think there will be an uproar in Norway and you’ll have very big protests and demonstrations and maybe a violent reaction.”
All of which begs the question: what will Trump do if he is not named the winner on October 10?
This is a man so vain that he adorned the walls of his golf clubs with fake Time magazine covers bearing his picture; so vain that Sir Keir Starmer was able to win him over simply by inviting him to make an unprecedented second state visit to Britain. For him the Nobel Peace Prize would be the greatest bauble of all, the ultimate accolade, an unequivocal affirmation of what he perceives to be his own greatness.
Publicly Trump plays down his chances, saying the prize is awarded by and to “liberals”. But he would doubtless be furious, and he is notorious for nurturing grudges and grievances.
Tiny Norway, a country of just 5.6 million people, should perhaps be wary: this president has a long record of punishing those who upset him.
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Alfred Nobel was an unmarried, largely self-taught Swedish chemist who invented dynamite and developed a major armaments company.
The story, perhaps apocryphal, is that a newspaper mistakenly published his obituary after his brother, Ludvig, died in 1888. ‘The merchant of death is dead,’ the headline allegedly proclaimed. ‘Dr Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday’.
Nobel was horrified. He saw dynamite as a force for good - a boon to mining and construction and a means of creating such destructive power that civilised nations would abjure war. So when he wrote his will in Paris in 1895 he left most of his great wealth to the prizes for chemistry, physics, medicine, literature and peace that still bear his name (the economics prize was created much later).
The peace prize, he stipulated, should be awarded by a “committee of five persons” selected by the Norwegian parliament to “the person who has done the most to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses”.
Thus it has been awarded 105 times to 142 laureates since 1901, 111 of the winners being individuals and 31 of them organisations. Over time the Nobel Committee has adopted an increasingly expansive interpretation of Nobel’s will, choosing human rights champions, political dissidents, relief organisations, humanitarians, journalists, agronomists and environmentalists as the winners.
Like its predecessors, this year’s committee reflects the political composition of Norway’s parliament, though none of its members are serving politicians.
Frydnes, the 40-year-old chair, was proposed by the ruling Labour party whose youth camp on the island of Utoya he rebuilt after a neo-Nazi gunman killed 69 participants in 2011. Gry Larsen, a former state secretary in the foreign affairs ministry, is another Labour nominee. Kristin Clemet, a former education minister, was put forward by the centre-right Conservative Party, Anne Enger by the Centre Party which she once led, and Asle Toje, a foreign affairs expert, by the right-wing Progress Party.
Nominations for the prize can be made by elected politicians from around the world, university professors, members of certain international bodies and former laureates, and must be submitted by January 31 - though the committee can add new names at its first meeting.
That raises the question of whether Trump is even a nominee, given that he had been president for just 11 days by this year’s deadline. Frydnes refuses to say. There were 338 nominees in all, but the names will be kept secret for 50 years - as are all the committee’s deliberations.
Since February the five members and Kristian Berg Harpviken, the Nobel Institute’s director, have been meeting regularly in the hallowed ‘committee room’ on the third floor of the Institute’s classical headquarters beside Oslo’s Royal Palace. They sit around a polished wooden table. A chandelier hangs from the ceiling. Portraits of all the previous peace prize winners adorn the walls.
They gradually winnowed the official nominees down to a dozen or so, then commissioned numerous reports on those shortlisted from what Frydnes calls “world-leading experts”. Those experts are never named but are mostly academics.
Back in 2000 Kim Dae-Jung, South Korea’s president, won the prize for pursuing detente on the Korean peninsula by paying Kim Jong-Il, his North Korean counterpart, to hold a summit and orchestrating a clandestine campaign to influence the committee.
“Korean embassies were deputised to work for the Nobel, the embassies in Norway and Sweden gave receptions to make contacts with Nobel people, had dinners, lunches, anything they could do,” said Donald Kirk, who exposed the campaign in a book. South Korean intelligence agents were enlisted. “There was nobody, no stone unturned, to get him the Nobel.
Today’s committee members are bound by strict ethical guidelines, but they are still subjected to Oscar-style lobbying campaigns. “Each year we receive thousands of letters and e-mails from people around the world eager to share their views on who should be honoured, but also on what kind of peace work deserves recognition,” says Frydnes. This year “the volume has been exceptionally high”, he adds.
But he insists that when the committee meets behind closed doors its members disregard all such campaigns, lay aside their political affiliations, ignore media speculation and consider each nominee purely on merit. “We have a mandate to fulfill Alfred Nobel’s will and that’s it,” he says.
The former member corroborates that. Acknowledging that the Kim Dae-Jung affair was “a bit of a wake-up call”, he insists that today “when you get into that committee…you shut out the noise. It’s all about protecting the integrity of the prize and the process.”
Moreover, the committee jealously guards its independence from the Norwegian government - a point Trump appeared not to understand when he raised this year’s prize with Stoltenberg.
In 2010, for example, the committee ignored discreet warnings from Jonas Gahr Stor, then Norway’s foreign minister and now prime minister, and awarded the prize to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Beijing retaliated with six years of trade and diplomatic sanctions against Norway.
Would the committee tell an interfering government minister to get lost? “Probably yes,” says Frydnes. “But it doesn’t happen and I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
The committee’s meetings generally last several hours with breaks for lunch which Frydnes, as the youngest member, must by tradition fetch from elsewhere in the building. Asked if the meetings are polite, contentious or riven by vigorous disagreement, he replies: “All of the above.”
The committee always seeks consensus. How often it succeeds is unknown because its minutes are sealed for half a century and - unlike almost any other committee - it never leaks. Just three times in 124 years have any members publicly dissented from the committee’s choice - over the awards to Carl von Ossietzky, an imprisoned German pacifist, in 1935, to Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho in 1973, and to Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat in 1994.
As in previous years, the Nobel Institute’s director will contact this year’s winner at 10.45am Oslo time on Oct 25 and announce the result 15 minutes later. The prize itself - a gold medal and roughly $1 million - will be awarded at a grand ceremony attended by Norway’s king and prime minister in Oslo City Hall on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
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Could Trump possibly be this year’s laureate? Most experts think not. “On what grounds?,” asked Nordlinger. “I can’t see what peace process or achievement you’d hang it on,” said the former committee member. Nominees with controversial pasts like F.W. de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev and Arafat have won in the past, he added, but only after radical changes of direction.
Trump did preside over the Abraham Accords, whereby several Arab states recognised Israel in 2020, but that was five years ago and the deal has been largely eclipsed and undermined by subsequent events in the Middle East.
He claims to have ended seven wars since resuming office, citing his interventions in confrontations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, Thailand and Cambodia, Egypt and Ethiopia, Pakistan and India, Serbia and Kosovo, and Israel and Iran.
But those claims are disputed, to say the least, and overshadowed by his far more obvious failure to end the two major conflicts of our time - President Putin’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s destruction of Gaza. Critics would argue that he has done nothing to constrain either Putin or Netanyahu.
Beyond that lies the question of values. The committee members are citizens of a tiny, vulnerable country that was occupied by the Nazis in World War Two and shares a border with Putin’s Russia. Norway believes in international cooperation, the rule of law, human rights and bridge building - ideas scorned by a president who has withdrawn US support for “globalist institutions”, slashed US foreign aid, introduced punitive trade tariffs, talked of seizing Greenland and Canada by force and renamed the US Department of Defence the Department of War.
Just ten per cent of Norwegians backed Trump in last year’s US presidential election, and at least three members of this year’s committee appear to share that antipathy.
Shortly before last year’s election, Larsen was spotted wearing a baseball hat proclaiming ‘Make Human Rights Great Again’. Last December Frydnes, a former head of PEN Norway, cited Trump as he lamented the “erosion of freedom of expression even in democratic nations”. In May Clemet wrote that the US president was “dismantling American democracy” and “doing everything he can to tear down the liberal and rules-based world order”.
Trump is not wrong to complain that the prize is awarded by and to “liberals”. Just three times has it been awarded to obvious conservatives - President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Kissinger in 1973 and the Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos in 2016.
On occasion the committee has gone further. It knows the prize is a powerful means of promoting Norway’s world view. It “carries unmatched symbolic weight” and “reminds us that courage and integrity matter” and “keeps hope alive, particularly among younger generations who will shape tomorrow’s world”, says Frydnes. So while it has mostly used the prize to reward concrete achievements or encourage those fighting for peaceful causes, it has also used it to issue tacit rebukes to the powerful or to influence current events.
Ossietzky’s prize in 1936 was a response to Hitler and the rise of National Socialism, for example. The one given to Oscar Arias Sanchez, Costa Rica’s president, in 1987 was seen as a rebuff to President Reagan’s support for oppressive right-wing governments and guerilla groups in Latin America. The awards to Jimmy Carter in 2002, Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2005, and Al Gore in 2007 were seen as rebukes to President George W Bush before and during the calamitous US occupation of Iraq.
This year’s committee could well choose to do the same. It could pointedly award the prize to one of the many multilateral institutions that Trump has scorned - the UN relief agency working in Gaza, the World Health Organisation, the International Criminal Court or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to name but a few.
How Trump would react is anyone’s guess, but he is already aggrieved that Obama, his predecessor, won the prize just six months after becoming president while he was overlooked throughout his first term: “If I were named Obama I’d have had the Nobel Prize given to me in ten seconds,” he has complained. “He got the Nobel Prize. He didn’t even know what the hell he got it for.”
He could merely rant against liberal bias and ram home the fact that the Nobel committee has made bad calls in the past.
Myanmar’s Aung San Sui Kyi, the 1991 laureate, turned out to be a flawed champion of human rights. Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed embarked on a civil war one year after winning the 2019 prize. Obama’s award just six months into his first term in 2009 was, by common consent, premature and not justified by anything he did later. Once awarded, peace prizes cannot be revoked.
Or Trump could retaliate. He does not readily forgive or forget perceived slights, and like Beijing in 2010 he might choose to ignore or disbelieve the fact that the committee is genuinely independent of the Norwegian government.
He could ramp up trade tariffs on Norway (they are already at 15 per cent) or discourage other countries from buying Norwegian oil or gas. He could restrict the access of Norwegian officials to his administration. His allies have already threatened visa restrictions and other sanctions after Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund - another independent body - divested from the US construction equipment company Caterpillar over Israel’s use of its bulldozers to lay waste to Gaza.
There is, understandably, a degree of nervousness in Oslo right now. “You never know what he’ll do,” says Stenersen.
Nina Daeger, director of Oslo’s Peace Research Institute, thinks Norwegian politicians and diplomats should be actively explaining to the people around Trump that the Norwegian government does not control the committee. “It will require some work,” she warns.
Tybring-Gjedde fears that Trump “really believes that the Norwegian government is responsible for handing out the peace prize and that’s very dangerous for Norway…There are all kinds of punishments which Trump could make Norway suffer…He’ll never forget. He’ll remember this.”
Nordlinger cautions that the US president would “itch to retaliate” and possesses “great retaliatory power”. If the winner is not Trump, he adds, it had better be some “greatly admirable person or institution” whose victory cannot be challenged.