It’s no secret that Donald Trump He aspires to the Nobel Peace Prize. It is his great obsession. The White House resident declared at the end of September that not granting him the award would be “a great insult” not only for him, but for the United States.
The Republican president believes he has earned enough merit to meet the standards of the Norwegian committee. Furthermore, his nemesis, Barack Obamawon it when he had not even been in the Oval Office for a year for having created, the Norwegian committee argued at the time, “a new climate in international politics.”
Other presidents of the United States such as Theodore Roosevelt y Woodrow Wilson they raised it while they were in office, and only Jimmy Carter He did the same more than two decades after leaving the White House. And that, unlike Trump, none of them had resolved a whopping seven wars—eight, including Gaza. According to your own calculations, of course.
The list that the US president enumerated at the beginning of September from the rostrum of the UN General Assembly included remote (or not so remote) conflicts such as those between Serbia and Kosovo, Egypt and Ethiopia, India and Pakistan, Thailand and Cambodia, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Armenia (a country that Trump even confused with Albania) and Azerbaijan (a nation he referred to for several weeks as Aberbaiyán).
In half of the cases, their mediation did not resolve the armed conflict. In the other half, there was not even an armed conflict to resolve. The elephant in the room was his inaction in Ukraine and Gaza. Two real wars that, since his inauguration in January, had only intensified.
There were no merits. Those merits were made, however, on Wednesday afternoon, when he announced through his Truth Social platform that Israel and Hamas had agreed on the “first phase” of the agreement based on their peace plan for Gaza.
This Thursday, before the Cabinet of Benjamin Netanyahu ratifying the agreement, reached in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh, Trump boasted of having achieved “a momentous advance in the Middle East, something that people said he would never achieve.”
“We have ended the war in Gaza and, in reality, on a much larger scale, we have created peace. I believe it will be a lasting peace, an eternal peace,” he predicted.
The association of the hostages’ relatives asked for the Nobel Peace Prize for him. They were not the only ones who spoke out in this regard. Netanyahu, who formally nominated Trump last July (although the deadline for nominations had expired at the end of January), rejoined the initiative.
The Israeli prime minister shared on social networks an image generated by Artificial Intelligence in which he himself presented Trump with the award. “Give Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize; he deserves it,” the message states.
Other international leaders, such as the prime ministers of Pakistan, Cambodia and Armenia, as well as the Azeri president, Ilham Aliyevhad already announced that they would nominate Trump to win an award that was won last year by Nihon Hidankyo, a group of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that is dedicated to campaigning against nuclear weapons.
Unlikely
The Norwegian Nobel Committee will announce the winner this Friday. But the decision has already been made. The group he presides Jørgen Watne Frydnesan activist in defense of human rights, and who make up the international relations expert Asle toje and three former Norwegian ministers, ended deliberations this Monday, according to his spokesman, Erik Aasheim. That is, more than 48 hours before Trump’s announcement about peace in Gaza. A little late.
“The agreement between Israel and Hamas has absolutely no impact on the election of the 2025 laureate, because the Nobel Committee has already made its decision,” declared the historian. Asle Sveena Nobel Prize specialist, who predicted that Trump would not win the prize this year: “I am one hundred percent sure.”
The pools do not place him as a favorite. The Polymarket prediction platform, which allows users to bet, puts Trump with less than a 5% chance, behind the Sudan Emergency Response Rooms (ERR), whose humanitarian role is essential in the ongoing civil war suffered by the African country.
Nor does it surpass Yulia Navalnayawidow of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalni. Even Doctors Without Borders and the International Criminal Court (ICC), a court whose prosecutors have been sanctioned by the Trump Administration, have more options.
The director of the Oslo Peace Research Institute (PRIO), Nina Grægerannounced this Thursday that the Sudan Emergency Response Rooms, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom started with a clear advantage.
“Although [Trump] clearly deserves recognition for his efforts to end the war in Gaza, it is still too early to know whether the peace proposal will be implemented and lead to lasting peace,” he noted.
Diplomatic pressure
The pressure that Washington has put on Oslo is fierce. According to the Financial TimesTrump himself brought up the issue of the Nobel Peace Prize during a telephone conversation that had nothing to do with – they were negotiating tariffs – with the Norwegian Minister of Finance, Jens Stoltenbergformer Secretary General of NATO.
Your foreign colleague, Espen Barth Eidehas reiterated in public that, although its members are appointed by Parliament, the committee is independent. But their arguments do not convince Trump.
The aforementioned Græger lamented this week that putting pressure on those in charge of making the decision “is not, let’s say, a very peaceful approach.”
The leader of the Left Socialist Party of Norway, Kirsti Bergstøwhose parliamentary group serves as a crutch for the Labor Government Jonas Gahr Størewarned this Thursday in statements to The Guardian that the Nordic country “must be prepared for anything” in case Trump, as everything suggests, does not receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Donald Trump is taking the United States in an extreme direction, attacking freedom of expression, using masked secret police forces to kidnap people in broad daylight, and repressing institutions and the courts,” he concluded. “When a president is so volatile and authoritarian, of course we must be prepared for anything.”
It would not be the first time that Norway has paid the price. When the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the prize in 2010, Beijing froze diplomatic ties with Oslo and imposed economic sanctions for six years. Will Trump reproduce the methods of the Chinese Communist Party?