Nose-holding might not always be entirely dishonourable

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The deliberations of the committee awarding the Nobel Peace Prize are secret. It’s just as well; it’s easy enough to imagine how much hilarity Trump’s hyped-up claims to have solved several wars (some of which the ‘participants’ didn’t even know had happened) would have caused the members. It’s also easy to imagine the extent to which Trumpian anger would have boiled over had that hilarity become publicly known rather than merely widely assumed.

It's probably reasonable to assume that his blatant campaigning for the prize might just have rubbed a few people up the wrong way as well: it’s not the way things are usually done. It’s hard to believe that a man who renamed the Department of Defence as the Department of War; whose government demands a stronger warrior culture and the abandonment of any rules of engagement which might prevent US forces from unleashing fear and intimidation; who is determined to unleash maximum lethal force on the streets of his own country; and who has taken to random extra-judicial killings of people in boats in international waters might not have struggled a little to be seen as a ‘man of peace’.

He might, though, have just the tiniest bit of justification in his jealousy about how Obama got the award so early in his presidency. What exactly had Obama done at that point to justify the award other than having learned to string a sentence together and avoid being called George Bush? Neither of those two things are entirely inconsequential, but they’re not exactly epoch-making either. Brokering a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel is no mean feat, although since it appears to have happened only because Trump effectively ordered Netanyahu to stop the bombing there are questions about whether it could have been done earlier. His expectation that he could announce the ceasefire one day and pick up the prize the next was always a long way short of realistic.

If the ceasefire holds and turns into a lasting peace, then maybe next year or the year after he might actually deserve some sort of recognition even while continuing to attract condemnation for many of the other things he does. He doesn’t understand the connectedness and maybe we shouldn't even expect him to; for him, the self-styled great deal-maker, every deal should be judged in complete isolation. It’s part of his natural transactionalism. There may even be a sense in which holding out the possibility of the prize which he clearly covets so much might encourage him to stick with the Israel-Palestine peace process for longer than his usual gnat’s length attention span. The probability of that happening currently looks very low, but if a nod-and-a-wink now made such an outcome more likely, might not a bit of collective nose-holding be worthwhile?