Days after he ordered the bombing of Iran — unprovoked — Donald Trump was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. This is not the first such nomination for the current president of the United States of America. In June, Pakistan’s government also said it would nominate Mr Trump for the prize, which, as per Alfred Nobel’s will, is to be awarded to someone who has advanced fellowship among nations, abolished or reduced standing armies, and held and promoted peace meetings. Mr Trump wants to expand the US military, project hard power, and make the world bend to his wishes through tariffs and missiles. At the same time, he has long craved the tag of a peacemaker; consequently, the Nobel Peace Prize has held a special allure for him. During his first term as president, Mr Trump had declared that he deserved the prize after his outreach to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. In his present term, he has cited the ceasefire between India and Pakistan after their May conflict, the tenuous truce between Iran and Israel in June, and the peace talks involving Israel and Hamas as evidence of his credentials, making it clear, once again, just how much he covets this particular award.
The absurdity of the nominations in favour of Mr Trump should be clear. India has repeatedly emphasised that the pause in fighting with Pakistan was the outcome of a bilateral decision in which the US had no mediating role. Mr Trump greenlit Israel’s attacks on Iran and then joined them, all in violation of the United Nations charter: in effect, he wants credit for arranging the pause in a conflict that he helped start and exacerbate. In Gaza, his path to peace involves the ethnic displacement — cleansing? — of Palestinians to build beach-front hotels. That the nominations have come from a leader wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and a State waging a proxy war against India and Afghanistan using terrorists for decades says it all. Israel and Pakistan are merely — and transparently — pandering to Mr Trump’s ego in order to keep themselves in his good books.
Yet, Mr Trump would not be a misfit in the gallery of questionable Nobel Peace Prize laureates and nominees. Alongside many genuinely worthy winners, the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize include Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, whose accomplishments include the carpet bombing of Cambodia in which hundreds of thousands died, the coup against a democratically-elected Chilean government, and support for Pakistan’s massacres in present-day Bangladesh. Then there is Barack Obama under whose presidency the US expanded drone wars and bombed other nations at record rates. Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, another winner, would later allow the mass killings of the Rohingya; Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed Ali oversaw a bloody war in the country’s Tigray region; Menachem Begin and Mohammad Anwar Al-Sadat, joint winners of the prize in 1978, were accused of human rights abuses and massacres; most gallingly, even Adolf Hitler, 20th-century’s most notorious leader, had been nominated for the same prize in 1939.
These winners and nominees reveal a cruel irony; the Nobel Peace Prize has often been a prisoner of geostrategic interests and served as a conduit for legitimacy for men and women with blood on their hands. This calls for a rechristening. Should the Nobel Peace Prize on occasion be renamed the Orwellian Peace Prize?