Why shouldn’t Trump win the Nobel Prize?
There are times you can almost hear the left-wing aneurysms rupturing. Such a moment occurred this week when it was announced that Donald Trump’s name had been put forward for the Nobel Peace Prize. Cue outrage, shock, denial, grief and rage.
In fact his name has been proposed twice: first by Christian TybringGjedde, a member of the Norwegian parliament, for the deal Trump’s administration brokered between Israel and the United Arab Emirates; secondly by Magnus Jacobsson, a member of the Swedish parliament, for a peace deal between Serbia and breakaway republic Kosovo.
There are good reasons to nominate Trump for the prize. The first is the fact that we are still here.
When Trump took office, his opponents — Democrats and Republicans — claimed he was going to get everybody on earth killed several times over.
As it happened, his high-risk to and fro with Kim Jong Un did not lead to a nuclear exchange but to one of diplomacy’s strangest friendships.
Before Trump, American presidents repeatedly got their military stuck in Middle Eastern quagmires; Trump ran for office promising not to get into any more such unwinnable wars. When they have come, his interventions have been short and sharp.
Of course it is not enough to avoid war; a criteria for the Nobel must surely be to prevent or reconcile conflicts. In these areas Trump has had notable success.
Just last week there was the historic agreement between Kosovo and Serbia, normalising relations for the first time since the bitter civil war of the 90s.
But perhaps the achievement over which the Nobel Prize should most seriously be considered is the agreement signed last month between Israel and the UAE — the most significant diplomatic success since the 1994 peace treaty between Jordan and Israel.
There is no reason why relations between the Gulf states and Israel should not thrive — other than that for decades they have been told to do so would in some way betray the Palestinian cause. The Palestinian leadership has for years demonstrated it has no interest in peace, turning down deal after deal.
But the Trump administration realised that if normalisation is to occur, it cannot rely on the intransigent and corrupt Palestinian leadership.
The UAE-Israel deal recognises that many other areas of co-operation are possible without having to wait for the Palestinian cartel.
An award to Trump might be unlikely, but in the history of Nobel Prizes it would be far from the most undeserved.