US president Donald Trump will not win the Nobel Peace Prize he so covets as he is dismantling the international world order the award committee cherishes, according to experts.
His lobbying is likely to be counterproductive too. The award-giving committee prefers to work independently, sheltering from outside pressures.
Instead, the five-strong body may wish to highlight a humanitarian organisation working in an environment that has become more challenging partly due to Mr Trump’s US aid cuts. The announcement is due this coming Friday.
This could mean an award for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, the UN children’s agency, Unicef, the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontieres, or a local grassroots group such as Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms, among others.
“He has no chance to get the peace prize at all,” said Asle Sveen, a historian of the award, citing Mr Trump’s support for Israel in the war in Gaza and his attempts at rapprochement with Russian president Vladimir Putin, among the reasons.
Alfred Nobel’s will, the award’s foundation, says the award should go to the person “who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations”.
That is something Mr Trump is not doing, according to Nina Graeger, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
“He has withdrawn the US from the World Health Organisation and from the Paris Accord on climate, he has initiated a trade war on old friends and allies,” she said.
“That is not exactly what we think about when we think about a peaceful president or someone who really is interested in promoting peace.”
To be sure, many surprising candidates have won the Nobel Peace Prize in the past – Barack Obama, less than eight months after he became US president, or US national security adviser Henry Kissinger at the height of the Vietnam War.
“Sometimes people have received the Peace Prize despite a brutal record, an authoritarian record, a background where they’ve contributed to evil, or at least wrongdoing,” said Henrik Syse, a former member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
“But they had explicitly seen the things that they had contributed to were wrong, and therefore took the steps necessary to correct these wrongs,” he said, citing the example of FW de Klerk, the last apartheid-era leader of South Africa, who won the prize jointly with Nelson Mandela in 1993.
Should Mr Trump be able to put pressure on Mr Putin to end the war in Ukraine or on Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to stop the war in Gaza, he could well be discussed as a possible candidate, Ms Graeger said.
Many have lobbied to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but no one has done it more intensely than Trump. He has used his platform as US president repeatedly to argue he should win the award, including when addressing the UN General Assembly last month.
But lobbying is generally counterproductive, according to the deputy leader of the present Norwegian Nobel Committee.
“These types of influence campaigns have a rather more negative effect than a positive one. Because we talk about it on the committee. Some candidates push for it really hard and we do not like it,” Asle Toje said. He was speaking generally about lobbying and not about any particular candidate.
“We are used to working in a locked room without being influenced. It is hard enough as it is to reach an agreement among ourselves, without having more people trying to influence us,” he added, with a smile. – Reuters
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