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Life is full of disappointments. Trump again did not win the Peace Nobel, and appears visibly upset:
I am a bit surprised that Trump was surprised. If you told me that he would win next year's Nobel prize, my best guess would be that he had occupied Oslo and forced them to give him a Nobel at gunpoint.
So far, there have been two Norwegian lawmakers who have nominated Trump over the years, out of a parliament of 169. The parliament determines the Nobel committee, generally in proportion to their party strengths. Three of the five members will be replaced at the end of the year. There is no way in hell that the current parliament will vote in people who are receptive of Trump getting the Nobel for bombing Iran, and they will dominate the committee for six years, so even if some MAGA fans won the next election in a landslide, it seems very unlikely that Trump would get a Nobel before he croaks.
Even less likely is that Trump will do an 180 which will convince people that he deserves the Nobel. In his first term, he was not especially belligerent, but this time, he has taken actions which bar the Nobel unless he give some very costly signals renouncing his previous behavior. Which he obviously won't.
All of this is common knowledge. So the surprising thing about Trump is that he is actually surprised, that he had a world model in which he was more likely to win the Nobel than win Miss China.
Last year, the Nobel committee at least took Trump's feelings into account by awarding the prize to Machado, a democracy activist in Venezuela who was allied with Trump in fighting the Maduro government (and subsequently gifted her medal to Trump). Per WP, she is currently denied entry into Venezuela, seems the Rodríguez government has no interests in letting her in and Trump does not care either way as long as the US gets the oil. I am Jack's total lack of surprise.
This year, the picked laureate is a bit less reconciliatory towards Trump. Pillay seems like the antithesis to Trump. Not only is she a black woman, but she has made a career in international law. She was part of the International Criminal Court, whose members are currently under sanction from the Trump administration for going after Israeli politicians accused of war crimes. Later, she was a UN high commissioner for human rights and a member of the International Court of Justice before finally heading the Commission of Inquiry on Occupied Palestinian Territory which determined that Israel had indeed committed genocide during the Gaza war.
It the committee had wanted to pick a candidate to signal "fuck Donald Trump in particular", they could hardly have done better short of awarding it to Harris or the Ayatollah.
In a better world, Pillay would not be considered worthy of the Nobel. "Yes, she is part of the justice system which deals with terrible atrocities which have been committed in Rwanda or Myanmar, but that system is already universally supported by the civilized world. We would prefer to make a statement a bit spicier than 'war crimes bad' with our prize."
Instead, we live in times where everything Pillay stands for is under attack, where the theory of international relations endorsed by the most powerful country on earth can be summarized as "the strong will do what they wilt, the weak will suffer what they must". In this world, it makes total sense for the Nobel committee to throw their support behind international law.
You are surprised Trump has a mental world model in which he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize (and all other prizes, so if he cheats or commits fraud to acquire gains he is merely taking what is rightfully his)?
I thought that the 2025 tariffs were too obviously a bad idea to be real. Since then, no idea has been too deranged.
It is not surprising that Trump believes he deserves the Nobel Prize, it’s surprising that Trump thought the Scandanavian pinkos who hate him, would give it to him.
Yeah, if that's what he really thought.
I am pretty much automatically skeptical of any newspaper article which makes off-the-wall claims about Trump. I had this thing during his first term with a liberal female family member who would regularly say things like "Can you believe Trump said 'X'" where X was something totally unreasonable and off the wall. And each time I would scrutinize her claims and find that each time, Trump hadn't actually said X. That instead, he had said "Y," and it had been uncharitably interpreted by the press. Who had that written a story carefully crafted to give readers the impression that Trump had said X without saying so explicitly. This happened again and again until my family member stopped bringing up Trump to me.
Anyway, I haven't been following peace news that carefully, but I definitely think that at a minimum, Trump should have been in contention for the Peace Prize for his role in the peace deal between Israel and the UAE and a couple other Arab countries. That's real progress, except of course that in my mental model of progressives, those peace deals were no good. Because they were a win for Israel, a country which, in the progressive worldview, should not exist. (If anyone wants to correct me on this point, feel free.)
A different Nobel Committee might reasonably have given a Nobel Peace Prize for the Abraham Accords, although I think with Saudi Arabia still not signed up it would have been a poor choice. But Nobel Peace Prizes for that type of deal almost always go to the principals (here Netanyahu and AbZ for the deal done to date, and Salman if Saudi joins) and not the third-party mediator. For example, Carter did not share the 1978 prize with Begin and Sadat. And even if they did award the prize to a mediator, Kushner has earned it and Trump, personally, has not.
So the chance of Donald Trump personally getting a Nobel Peace Prize for the Abraham Accords would be negligible even if he hadn't started three wars of choice since 2024, which is and probably should be disqualifying.
I wasn't aware of that. Assuming you are correct (that the mediator never gets the Peace Prize) then I withdraw my argument.
Rechecking the list, Teddy Roosevelt got the 1906 Nobel (solo) for ending the Russia-Japan war of 1905, which would be a clear-cut exception. Ralph Bunche got the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his attempts to mediate the incipient Arab-Israeli conflict (also solo - in that case it is of course very clear that none of the principals deserved it) - the prize citation implies that he won it for mediating the ceasefire agreements that ended the Israeli War of Independence, but Wikipedia implies that it was a kind of lifetime achievement award.
The famous cases I was thinking of were the awards for Locarno (1925-6), Vietnam (1973), Israel-Egypt (1978), South Africa (1993), Israel-Palestine (1994) and Northern Ireland (1998) which were shared between principals. So looking more closely I wouldn't say the mediator never gets the prize, but by default it would go to the principals, and the Abraham Accords doesn't look like an exception.
1973 and 1994 were, of course, two of the worst Peace Prize awards in the undistinguished history of the prize. I think 1950 was below average - the most notable thing about attempts to mediate the Israel-Palestine conflict (including Bunche's) is how utterly they failed. And I don't think mediating an ugly freeze-the-status-quo armistice that doesn't lead to a peace treaty is close to a Nobel-worthy achievement.
The peace Nobel prize is never actually about the achievement, but about the message that the Nobel Committee wants to send. It's just incidental if the message they want to send is approval of an achievement. They gave the peace prize to Obama because they approved of his election, not because of an actual achievement. They gave it to Malala to take a stand against the Taliban's opposition to girl's education, not because she did anything special (getting shot is not an achievement).
And I think "outsiders should be spending time and effort trying to make peace in the Middle East when the locals are actually happier fighting each other" is a dumb message to send.
My position on the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is shared by the vast majority of normies, is "not my circus, not my monkeys".
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