Of course Trump deserves the Nobel Prize

The Left may be outraged, but there are good reasons why the president merits his recent nomination

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, rage, and a number of less elevated emotions.

Of course the fact that the president has been put forward for the prize does not mean he will win it. His name has been proposed by Christian Tybringgjedde, a member of the Norwegian parliament for the conservative Progress Party. Mr Tybring-gjedde is suffering something of a backlash himself, having been described as “far-right” by media around the world, as they attempted to simultaneously feign knowledge of Norwegian politics and discredit the Trump nomination.

In fact, there are good reasons to nominate Mr Trump for the prize. And if you stand back and survey them they are obvious.

The first is the fact that we are still here. When Mr Trump took office, his opponents in the Republican party, as much as among its opposition, claimed the president was going to get everybody on earth killed several times over. A number of his subsequent foreign policy engagements were held up as examples of this. But most of these exchanges remained purely verbal. 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. Although North Korea remains an international pariah, and the president walked away when the North Koreans pushed too hard, the initiatives and search for peace were considerable and historic.

The same goes for other parts of the world. Before Mr Trump, American presidents had repeatedly got their country’s military stuck in various Middle Eastern quagmires. Mr Trump ran for office promising not to get his country into any more such unwinnable wars and he kept that promise. When they have come, his interventions have been short and sharp. In January this year, when he ordered the killing of Iran’s top terror general, Qasem Soleimani, many people predicted the arrival of World War III. Pundits competed to make comparisons with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. But World War III did not kick off. The Iranians blustered for a time but seemed rightly deterred by a US president who uses the military as a sharp stick rather than as a tool for getting stuck in quicksand.

Of course it is not enough to simply avoid war; one of the criteria for being awarded the Nobel must surely be to prevent, stop or reconcile conflicts. In all of these areas Mr Trump and his administration have had notable successes. Just last week his diplomats brokered a historic agreement between Kosovo and Serbia. The deal normalised relations between the two countries for the first time since the bitter civil war of the Nineties.

But perhaps the achievement that is most historic, and over which the Nobel Prize should most seriously be considered, is the Trump administration’s brokering of another historic normalisation deal. That is, the agreement signed last month between Israel and the United Arab Emirates – 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. In fact, the Palestinian leadership has for years demonstrated it has no interest in peace, turning down deal after deal whenever one has been on the table. The Trump administration realised something previous administrations had failed to act on, even if they realised it too. Which is that if normalisation is to occur, it cannot rely on the intransigent and corrupt Palestinian leadership. The Uae-israel deal acknowledges this and recognises that many other areas of cooperation are possible without having to wait for the Palestinian cartel.

For many people, the idea of Mr Trump winning the Nobel Peace Prize is fantastical. But his predecessor, Barack Obama, was awarded it in the first year of his presidency – before he had actually done anything. The award to Mr Trump might be unlikely, but in the long history of Nobel Prizes it would be far from the most undeserved.