End the Nobel Peace Prize [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

The Trump nomination shows that peace had its chance, and blew it.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

Graeme Wood
Staff writer at The Atlantic



GETTY / THE ATLANTIC

Trolls are a Scandinavian invention, straight from the frigid sagas of Norse mythology, but Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a Norwegian parliamentarian, swears that he is not one. Observers of his antics this week could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. On Wednesday, he announced that he had nominated Donald J. Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. “Can you name a person who has done more for peace than President Trump?” Tybring-Gjedde asked me, insisting that the question was a serious one. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, agreed. ”This is a hard-earned and well-deserved honor for the president,” she said. Tybring-Gjedde defended his nomination on Fox News remotely, and to me in person at a café in Oslo. “Do we give the prize to Greta Thunberg, for screaming about the environment?” he asked. “The agreement he made between Israel and the United Arab Emirates could mean peace between Israel and the Arab world. That is like the [Berlin] Wall falling down.” Today the White House reportedly will announce that Bahrain, another Gulf monarchy, will recognize Israel.

If Trump wins the prize, it will be the fourth Nobel awarded for peace between Israel and its neighbors. (The announcement will come on October 9.) That will make Arab-Israeli peace mediators more successful at charming the Nobel Committee than the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has won three times in the prize’s 120-year history, but still less successful than my favorite, which is no one at all. The committee has declined to award a peace prize 19 times, most recently in 1972. (The next year, in a decision so trollish it might have come out of the Prose Edda, they awarded the prize to Henry Kissinger.) Giving the peace prize to no one at all is a tradition the Nobel Committee should revive, perhaps on a permanent basis. The record of achievement of the peace laureates is so spotty, and the rationales for their awards so eclectic, that the committee should take a long break to consider whether peace is a category coherent enough to be worth recognizing. Peace had its chance, and blew it. The Trump nomination—one of hundreds, including this second from a Swede—helps show why.

Tybring-Gjedde is from Norway’s Progress Party, a right-wing populist answer to the established parties of the right and left. (National parliamentarians are entitled to nominate candidates for the prize. So are professors, past laureates, and various other bigwigs from international organizations.) His nomination of Trump strikes me as preposterous. “Other politicians don’t pick up the phone to talk,” Tybring-Gjedde said. “He has the ability to be down-to-earth and talk to people at all levels.” Tybring-Gjedde notes that Alfred Nobel listed as one of the criteria for the winners that they encourage “peace congresses”—and what is a peace congress but a conversation between people who are not at peace? In my view the deal between the Emirates and Israel is good for the region, but a deal between Israel and the absolute monarchs of a small Gulf state is not a deal between Israel and the people of the Emirates, let alone between Israelis and Palestinians. Trump’s main diplomatic maneuver is to adopt a lickspittle posture toward authoritarians, promising them decades in power in return for a smile and a condo development. Peace does not mean a web of personal agreements between rich psychopaths.

But if the opening of dialogue, no matter how demeaning or ineffectual, and signing of deals, no matter how undemocratic, are a condition of the prize, then Tybring-Gjedde’s case has merit. All the Nobel Committee really needs to know it could have learned in kindergarten. “Isn’t it strange,” Tybring-Gjedde asked, “that in school you learn that to talk to people is the best thing? And now we are told talking to the wrong people is a bad thing. Maybe [if you talk] you will notice that [the other guy] is not as bad as you think.”

More:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/end-nobel-peace-prize/616300/