President Donald Trump is waiting to hear if his dream will come true this week – whether his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize becomes a reality.
He doesn’t have much longer to hold on – the announcement will be made on Friday.
His public campaign for the accolade started off with a joke in 2018: “Everyone thinks so but I would never say it,” he said of a possible nomination. “The prize I want is victory for the world.”
Five years on, his stance had changed to “I deserve it, but they will never give it to me” when asked about it in February this year after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “I should have gotten it four or five times” when quizzed in June.
But, despite polling suggesting otherwise, the former Apprentice star is a contender for the prize, which its creator Alfred Nobel said should be awarded to the person who has done the “most or best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”.
FanDuel, one of America’s biggest betting companies, has Trump just behind bookies favourite Yulia Navalnaya (wife of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny) and the aid organisation Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms.
Who nominated Trump?
Several people and several organisations.
Netanyahu, the government of Pakistan, the government of Cambodia and US politician Buddy Carter were among those who put the president’s name forward this year.
A senior Ukrainian politician nominated Trump, only to withdraw the suggestion in June this year and accuse the president of appeasing Vladimir Putin.
Can he win?
The Nobel Committee is made up of five people, the majority of whom have been critical of Trump in public.
However, its decision-making criteria is not straightforward and it can serve a symbolic or “geopolitical” purpose as well as reward real achievements and results.
“The trouble with the criteria is it’s so abstract,” says Professor Matthew Mokhefi-Ashton, principal lecturer in politics and international relations at Nottingham Trent University.
He points to “aspirational” awards given to Barack Obama, who won the award in 2009 before his first year was up, purely on the back of his election campaign. It led to the Nobel secretary later admitting that the former president’s win had been a “mistake”.
Other controversial and notable Nobel Laureates include US diplomat and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger for his role in ending the Vietnam War in 1973, although he was also accused of war crimes. “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize,” said Tom Lehrer, the American musician, satirist and mathematician of his win.
“In a world where that can happen, then absolutely I think it is possible for Trump to win the Nobel Peace Prize,” Professor Mokhefi-Ashton says, noting that Trump is very focused on “legacy”.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, representing the relatives of the majority of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, called on the Committee to award Trump the prize, saying he had “brought us light through our darkest times”.
But Theo Zenou, a historian and research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, has said he would not place bets on Trump winning.
“Trump has been incredibly vocal about his desire, his craving for the Peace Prize. He says he ‘deserves’ one, it would be a ‘travesty’ if he didn’t and so on. That extreme entitlement won’t please the committee,” he says.
“They don’t want to be seen to be giving in to pressure or caving in to bravado. They usually prefer people whose work speaks for itself. You don’t get the Oscar for Best Actor for continuously saying you gave the best performance, you let your work speak for itself”.
Furthermore, he points to Trump’s claim that he has “ended seven wars”, an oft-repeated phrase that has been handled with scepticism by his critics. Last month, the US State Department listed the seven wars the “President of Peace” had ended “in just seven months”. They included: Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, Pakistan and India, DRC and Rwanda, Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
“Trump has a very facile definition of peace, which is he thinks peace is the absence of fighting, the absence of people shooting at each other with machine guns, but obviously that’s not what peace is,” says Mr Zenou, giving the example of Iran and Israel’s ongoing hostility, which he says cannot be said to have ended following the end of 12 days of fighting.
“There are many conflicts that have ebbs and flows and real peace takes a long time to achieve.”
Professor Mokhefi-Ashton says that the Committee will be looking for evidence of a “durable peace” and not look like they have “jumped the gun”.
Timing another issue for Trump
With nominations for the Prize closing in January, all of the nominations he has received this year won’t count towards the award announced on Friday. Furthermore, the full details of the nominations are not revealed for another 50 years, so it is not possible to know for certain how popular his nomination was.
Many of his peace deals are still ongoing. “It’s simply not possible to award someone the Nobel Peace Prize for a deal that he has only just started last week,” Mr Zenou said of the ongoing Israel-Hamas talks, brokered by the US, Qatar and Egypt.
Climate change denial could prove controversial
Trump’s comments denying the climate crisis last week will also be considered as controversial, he says.
“The Nobel Committee may think there is some potential gain in having him win the prize,” he says. “It might be transactional, for example with the intention that it may encourage him to support Ukraine more. But if it does that as a geopolitical calculation, it will lose a lot of its lustre going forward, every world leader will try to do the same thing.”
“Trump has made an entire career of beating the odds of doing things that no one would have thought possible,” Prof Mokhefi-Ashton says, although he doesn’t think the chances are high that he will win, calling it the “coup of a lifetime”.
That doesn’t mean he won’t be in the running again next year, with Prof Mokhefi-Ashton saying that Trump is far more of a long-term planner than people give him credit for. A loss this year won’t mean a loss forever to him, and he is unlikely to give up.
“People underestimate him, and people who have failed going up against him have failed exactly for that reason,” he says.
