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?
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