Comment: The cases for and against a Nobel for President Trump

By Andreas Kluth / Bloomberg Opinion

Once again, five otherwise obscure individuals on the Nobel committee in Oslo, chosen by the Norwegian parliament, made controversial news Friday in giving out their Peace Prize, the world’s most sought-after award. They did so for the best of reasons, for this year’s laureate — Maria Corina Machado of Venezuela — is as deserving as any has ever been.

Machado, as the committee put it, is known for her tireless work promoting democracy for Venezuelans and her struggle against dictatorship. That dictator is her nemesis, Nicolas Maduro. If Venezuela were free, Machado would probably be president instead of him. As it is, she’s in hiding to evade capture or worse, while still leading the opposition against him; and giving hope to Venezuelans and all others who love liberty.

And yet it’s impossible to overlook a candidate the committee conspicuously omitted: U.S. President Donald Trump. He took his second oath of office only 11 days before this year’s deadline for nominations and so couldn’t reasonably have won the 2025 award anyway, even if his latest — and laudable — efforts to bring peace to Gaza prove successful. Then again, Oslo did once give the medal “on spec” to an American president in his first year: Barack Obama in 2009. Even the committee members soon realized that this decision had been rushed and looked vaguely ridiculous. Trump, though, remains obsessed with it; somehow, he inferred that it entitled him to the Nobel now.

So he has done something unprecedented in the 124 years since the prize has been awarded: He launched a brazen and global lobbying effort, enlisting allies and supplicants at home and abroad to nominate and second him, while incessantly boasting about being a peacemaker and occasionally even menacing the committee, if not all of Norway, should he be snubbed.

“Everyone says I should get the Nobel Peace Prize,” he hyperbolized to the United Nations last month. “They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing,” he then preemptively sulked to an assembly of American generals and admirals. More ominously, he has suggested that being passed over would be “a big insult” to not only him but the entire United States. He’s already slapped tariffs of 15 percent on Norway in the first round of his global trade war; we’ll see where that goes in round two.

This ego trip did him no favors in Oslo, and probably backfired. (Both Norway and the Nobel committee not only frown on but ignore such outside pressure. In 2010, China warned against giving the prize to Liu Xiaobo, a jailed human-rights activist. He became the laureate anyway, and China froze diplomatic contacts with Oslo until 2016. China lost face, the Nobel Prizes gained face.) Alfred Nobel, the polyglot and reclusive Swedish inventor (of dynamite, most famously) who established the prize in his will, wished that it should go to the person who has in a given year “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations.” Fraternity isn’t the first word that springs to mind with Trump.

His methods and style work against him in the cerebral and understated Scandinavian milieu of the Nobel Prizes (the other five are awarded in Sweden). “Culturally, Trump is very much an antithesis for Norway,” a Norwegian professor told Bloomberg: “not subtle, not elegant.” Alfred Nobel didn’t want his medals to go to the person who clamored loudest and wielded the most clout; his ideal recipients wouldn’t ask for recognition at all and would remain focused on spreading fraternity.

Regarding that, Trump is, for now, a puzzle. He is genuinely pursuing peace in places from the Middle East (currently promising) and Ukraine (currently not) to Africa and Asia (where his role is questionable).

On the flip side, he’s deploying troops to American cities, bullying allies from Canada to Denmark, blowing up speedboats in the Caribbean and threatening war against Venezuela; perhaps the only thing he has in common with Machado is Maduro as an adversary. (While Machado has endorsed U.S. pressure, she opposes any U.S. military invasion to topple Maduro.) Whether renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War or staging caudillo-style military parades, Trump seems at least as obsessed with war as with peace.

But the Nobel committee lives in the real world, and human nature, as well as matters of war and peace, are too complex to fit onto one golden medal. Controversy and contradiction have dogged the prizes since 1901.

Did Teddy Roosevelt deserve his prize in 1906 for brokering peace between Russia and Japan? After all, he also did plenty of bullying. Was Henry Kissinger the best choice in 1973? He did agree a ceasefire in Vietnam (with the North’s Duc Tho, who shared the award but refused to accept it). But Kissinger had also orchestrated the bombing of Laos and Cambodia and was considered a war criminal by some.

While we’re at it, have fun debating the awards for, say, Palestine’s Yasser Arafat or Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed. And when you’re done, explain to me why Mohandas Gandhi, nominated five times, never won the prize.

The point is that their cases were difficult, and so is Trump’s. Since the nominating season for the 2026 prize is now open, here then is my unsolicited advice to the president.

First, stop boasting, threatening and crudely demanding the prize; the committee is capable of noticing what you do without your help. Second, in making foreign policy, focus not on “how it plays” on TV but on what saves lives today and prevents wars tomorrow.

If you do manage to pacify Gaza, it’s because you finally applied real pressure not just to Hamas but also to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. So try that approach with Vladimir Putin in Russia. Also, be nicer to your allies, because you’ll need them to deter Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang, and deterrence is good for peace. Not least, try to get them all together to start talking about limiting the new nuclear arms race that is underway.

If talking about War and Peace were easy, Leo Tolstoy wouldn’t have needed more than a thousand pages to do it. Trump will have multiples of that wordcount devoted to his legacy as it unfolds, not just over the next news cycle but the coming decades.

For now, here’s to Machado, Venezuelans and people everywhere who love freedom and hate tyranny. As to Trump, if he starts putting his prodigious power in the service of fraternity among nations, I’ll cheer loudest when he accepts the Nobel Peace Prize in 2026, or any other year.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.