A Nobel for Trump?

If Korea negotiations go well, he will have earned it

A year ago, the prospect of President Trump being considered for a Nobel Peace Prize would have sent critics’ heads spinning. Now, if all goes well in U.S. negotiations with North Korea, Trump should be the odds-on favorite.

Resolving the almost seven-decade division, one of the last major vestiges of the Cold War, would be an epochal international event. South Korea’s former president Kim Dae Jung was awarded the peace prize in 2000 for simply beginning the process of détente with North Korea.

Now, the historic summit between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un alone has the makings of a peace prizeworthy effort, effectively ending a war that had been frozen since the 1950s. But Moon went out of his way to give credit to Trump. “President Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize. All we need is to bring peace,” Moon said.

Trump indeed deserves much of the credit. Trump was the first president to explicitly link U.S. trade policy with China to progress on the Korean Peninsula. Trump knows that the art of the deal is based on leverage. North Korea’s economy depends on China, and China’s well-being depends on trade with the United States. Beijing has much less interest in defending the right of its erratic Pyongyang ally to develop highly destabilizing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles than it does in maintaining its global markets. This reality was no doubt the framework for discussions in March between Kim and Chinese President Xi Jinping, when Beijing told Pyongyang that the party was over.

Trump also made clear the potential consequences of not moving towards peace. Last year saw a series of threats and counter-threats as Kim took the measure of our new president. North Korea conducted provocative nuclear and missile tests. Pyongyang threatened to launch missiles towards America and said it had the right to down U.S. bombers even outside North Korea’s airspace. In response, Trump said that any North Korean acts of war would “be met with fire and fury ... the likes of which this world has never seen before.” Defense Secretary James Mattis laconically noted that if North Korea fired missiles towards the United States, it would be “game on.”

Trump is demonstrating that America can remain “the one indispensable nation in world affairs” (as his predecessor said) only if it behaves like it.

There is much yet to be done, of course. The outcome of the upcoming Trump/Kim summit will determine whether this prospective peace is durable or a mirage. But if all goes well and peace is finally at hand, a Nobel Prize for Trump would be a fitting tribute to his remarkable achievement.