By Gwladys Fouche
OSLO (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump will not win the Nobel Peace Prize he so covets as he is dismantling the international world order the award committee cherishes, according to experts.
His lobbying is likely to be counterproductive too. The award-giving committee prefers to work independently, one of its members told Reuters, sheltering from outside pressures.
Instead, the five-strong body may wish to highlight a humanitarian organisation working in an environment that has become more challenging partly due to Trump’s U.S. aid cuts. The announcement is on October 10.
This could mean an award for the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, or a local grassroots group such as Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms, among others.
“He has no chance to get the Peace Prize at all,” said Asle Sveen, a historian of the award, citing Trump’s support for Israel in the war in Gaza and his attempts at rapprochement with Russian President Vladimir Putin, among the reasons.
Alfred Nobel’s will, the award’s foundation, says the award should go to the person “who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations”.
That is something Trump is not doing, according to Nina Graeger, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
“He has withdrawn the U.S. from the World Health Organization and from the Paris Accord on climate, he has initiated a trade war on old friends and allies,” she told Reuters.
“That is not exactly what we think about when we think about a peaceful president or someone who really is interested in promoting peace.”
UNLIKELY NOBEL PEACE PRIZE LAUREATES
To be sure, many surprising candidates have won the Nobel Peace Prize in the past – Barack Obama less than eight months after he became U.S. President or U.S. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger at the height of the Vietnam War.
“Sometimes people have received the Peace Prize in spite of a brutal record, an authoritarian record, a background where they’ve contributed to evil, or at least wrongdoing,” said Henrik Syse, a former member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
“But they had explicitly seen the things that they had contributed to were wrong, and therefore took the steps necessary to correct these wrongs,” he said, citing the example of F.W. de Klerk, the last apartheid-era leader of South Africa, who won the prize jointly with Nelson Mandela in 1993.
Should Trump be able to put pressure on Putin to end the war in Ukraine or on Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to stop the war in Gaza, he could well be discussed as a possible candidate, Graeger said.
AN INTENSE LOBBYING CAMPAIGN
Many have lobbied to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but no one has done it more intensely than Trump. He has used his platform as U.S. president repeatedly to argue he should win the award, including when addressing the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday.
But lobbying is generally counterproductive, according to the deputy leader of the present Norwegian Nobel Committee.
“These types of influence campaigns have a rather more negative effect than a positive one. Because we talk about it on the committee. Some candidates push for it really hard and we do not like it,” Asle Toje said. He was speaking generally about lobbying and not about any particular candidate.
“We are used to work in a locked room without being attempted to be influenced. It is hard enough as it is to reach an agreement among ourselves, without having more people trying to influence us,” he added, with a smile.
For the current committee’s leader, the attention does not impact the work.
“All politicians want to win the Nobel Peace Prize,” Joergen Watne Frydnes told Reuters.
“We hope the ideals underpinned by the Nobel Peace Prize are something that all political leaders should strive for … We notice the attention, both in the United States and around the world, but outside from that, we work just the same way as we always do.”
WHO COULD WIN INSTEAD?
Aside from a humanitarian organisation, the committee could also highlight U.N. institutions such as the International Court of Justice, or the U.N. as a whole, which is marking its 80th anniversary this year.
It could also put the spotlight on journalists, following a year when more media workers than ever before were killed reporting the news, most of them in Gaza. If so, the committee could reward the Committee to Protect Journalists or Reporters Without Borders.
It could also highlight local mediators negotiating ceasefires and access to aid in conflicts, such as peace committees in the Central African Republic, the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding or the Elders and Mediation Committee in El Fasher, Darfur.
“Any of these would be deserving of the award,” said Karim Haggag, head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
(Reporting by Gwladys Fouche in Oslo, additional reporting by Ilze Filks in Stockholm; Editing by Alex Richardson)
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