No, not for the Israel-Hamas peace deal, which might yet unravel, but for systematically undermining, from within, the greatest imperial power the world has ever known
US President Donald Trump has been campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize for some time now, claiming to have ended seven wars, and now, the eighth one in Gaza. Instead of seeing the plain logic in giving the award to a man who has changed the name of the Department of Defence to the Department of War, the Nobel Committee has given it to a democratic campaigner in Venezuela.
The prime minister and the president of Israel have both urged the Nobel Committee to grant the prize to Trump. So have the leaders of another peaceable nation, Pakistan.
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Trump’s eligibility for the award can be a little tricky. He claims to have ended seven wars: Iran-Israel, Rwanda-Congo, Armenia-Azerbaijan, Egypt-Ethiopia, Serbia-Kosovo, Cambodia-Thailand and India-Pakistan.
Conflicts far from resolved
Everyone in India knows that the US might have had, at best, a peripheral role of providing Pakistan with a face-saving way out of continuing with a clash that it had decisively lost, and that India was intent on teaching Pakistan a lesson on the consequences of using terror as an instrument of state policy, rather than on military conquest of Pakistan.
A claim that hostilities between Israel and Iran have ended, rather than taken a break, might qualify for a prize in fiction, but not for peace. The Rwandan rebel group, M23, has not endorsed the peace agreement between Rwanda and the Congo. Rwanda formally does not accept that it supports M23. The heads of state of Armenia and Azerbaijan are yet to endorse the deal initialled by their foreign ministers.
Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan are locked in a tussle over the water that Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam will withhold from the two lower riparian nations, and only a major drought would determine if conflict has been averted or not. Serbia and Kosovo have not actually been at war, thanks to the presence of a NATO peacekeeping force in the region. Considering that Trump has been threatening to gut NATO, it is difficult to credit him for tensions between Serbia and its breakaway region, Kosovo, not boiling over. Cambodia and Thailand, in contrast, might actually have decided to set aside their hostilities, thanks to Trump’s threat to withhold trade deals unless they stopped their skirmishes.
Trump’s dubious Gaza triumph
What of the Gaza peace deal, the biggest one of them all, which Trump claims will end a war that has been going on for thousands of years. The conflict between Israel and Palestine formally commenced only with the establishment of the Zionist state in 1948. The Jews were conquered, by their own account, first by the Assyrians, who hailed from Iraq, then by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, who also came from present-day Iraq, and finally by the Romans, who completed the Jews’ exile from their promised land. The Palestinians find no mention in the Bible.
Trump’s discovery of a millennia-old conflict between Israel and Palestine is on par, in terms of displaying his general ignorance, with his claim to reduce drug prices by 600-1,000 per cent. If the price of anything is reduced by any extent greater than 100 per cent, the seller would have to pay the buyer. That kind of magic does not happen even in MAGA-land.
But Trump has succeeded in pressuring Netanyahu into accepting virtually the same deal that the Israeli prime minister had turned down in September 2024, when Biden was still the US president. Shouldn’t Trump get credit for that? There are two objections.
The wolf’s logic returns
One comes from the Panchatantra, specifically, the tale of the wolf and the stork. The wolf has a bone stuck in its throat that promises to prevent it from eating anything more. A stork saves him from starvation by putting its head inside the wolf’s mouth to use its long beak to take the bone out. The wolf begins to leave without so much as a thank you to the bird. The stork asks him why he is so lacking in grace and gratitude. The wolf replies that when the stork’s head was still within his mouth, after the bone had been loosened from his throat, he could have snapped his jaws shut and proceeded to make a meal out of the stork. That he chose not to do so, said the wolf, was his magnanimity, going beyond gratitude.
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For the American president and Gazans, the logic is similar — what could have been done was not done — to spare, in Gaza, rather than kill, as in the wolf’s case. The Americans simply had to stop arms supplies and diplomatic support to Israel, as it proceeded with its genocide in Gaza, for the war to come to an end. Even if you accept this, Trump proved more decisive than Biden had been, and shouldn’t he get credit for that?
Biden would have had to stop supporting Israel in the middle of the Democrats’ re-election campaign, and that carried the risk of fatal loss of voter support in a country conditioned to accept unquestioning support of Israel as a holy mission for the US. For Trump, an electoral challenge is far away. This is why he could force Netanyahu to accept the ceasefire deal, while Biden could not. To say that Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for the Gaza deal is to take the wolf’s side.
Bloodshed behind the brag
The Gaza war has killed at least 67,000 Palestinians, 30% of them children, destroyed the land’s physical infrastructure, and engendered pervasive animosity towards Muslims and Jews around the world, which would yield attacks and killings for years to come.
Trump has increased US military spending and forced the rest of the world to raise their military budgets as well.
So, if Trump does not deserve credit for his claimed achievements in making peace, why argue that he still deserves the Nobel Peace Prize? Trump is a warmonger. He has threatened to annex Greenland, take over the Panama Canal from Panama, has been attacking Venezuelan boats in international waters, and dropped bunker-busting bombs on Iran, and more conventional ordnance on Yemen. How can he possibly qualify for a Peace Nobel?
Trump undoing US dominance
There is structural violence of a high degree immanent in the unipolar dominance of the world by the US, even if that latent violence does not always bubble to the surface as actual death and destruction. Trump is gutting that unipolar dominance, with his policies that force the reluctant Europeans to emerge as a power centre in their own right, and persuade allies in Asia to increasingly discover the virtue of self-reliance in national security. The very increase in budget allocations to defence in country after country, thanks to the Trumpian penchant for American isolationism and the readiness this implies to renege on promises to stand by allies, in case they are attacked, is contributing to the world’s emerging multipolarity.
The American economy’s openness to trade and immigrant talent has given the US an unshakable lead in economic and technological power. Trump is gutting this. The 2025 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Omar Yaghi, is a Palestinian immigrant from Jordan, who came to the US when talent could flow freely to the US. Trump and his conviction that the US should preserve its territory for people of European origin would shut this door to American greatness. His economic policies are undermining the dollar’s credibility and pushing up the value of alternative assets such as gold and bitcoin, besides eroding American competitiveness.
Eroding clout, enabling multilateralism
A shrunken superpower would lead to greater accommodation among other powers as the only sensible course to peaceful coexistence. A unified NATO under unquestioned American leadership could think of depriving Russia of its only warm-water naval base in Crimea by making Ukraine a part of NATO.
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An isolationist US would force the rest of Europe to let Russia be, instead of eating into its national security. That would lead to the reintegration of Russia into the European mainstream, in whose cultural and literary canon, Russian creators have an undeniable place in any case.
The world has grown interdependent. Superpower dominance is at variance with the consensual decision-making that such interdependence requires. Eroding that dominance, as Trump is bent on, will pave the way for genuine multilateralism.
Let Trump corrode American dominance yet more, and greater swathes of global opinion would agree that he qualifies for a Nobel Peace Prize.
(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal.)
