Today should be Maria Corina Machado’s day, and let’s not exaggerate, to an extent it will be: she has, after all, just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the roughly $1m cash prize that goes with it.
She has the kind of track record befitting of a worthy winner of the award, too. She is an opposition leader in a country that barely tolerates dissent. She’s faced censorship, legal threats, and physical assault in the course of her campaigning. She’s won international awards and been recognised on multiple previous occasions.
And yet, on hearing about this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner most of us will have just one immediate reaction: so, they didn’t give it to Donald Trump, then.
This American president has the habit of taking up all of the oxygen in any room he enters, and he has waged an unprecedently open campaign to win the Nobel in a way no other world leader has even dreamed of. He had the leaders of many states lobby on his behalf. His officials reportedly cajoled the Norwegian government.
He used an address to the UN General Assembly to lobby for it. He framed himself as the man who “ended seven wars”, glossing over the fact this claim was vastly exaggerated – and that one of the wars he “ended” involved a bombardment on Iran’s nuclear facilities which he himself ordered.
Against the backdrop of such a campaign, the Nobel Peace Prize this year was always going to be seen through just one frame – would the pressure work and the prize go to Trump, or would it go to literally anyone except him?
Critics of the prize might note sourly that Trump might be a more fitting winner than he first appeared. The Nobel committee, after all, awarded the prize to Henry Kissinger, whose doctrine of realpolitik enabled war crimes across the world. Aung San Suu Kyi looked like a saintly recipient, until she turned a blind eye to the genocide of the Rohingya under her rule. Barack Obama won the Nobel for essentially doing nothing in 2009, only to then expand the US’s use of drone strikes and secret warfare around the world for most of his term.
Trump, the cynics among us could note, would fit right in among that company of prize winners, and show up the Nobel as something of a farce, a politically-expedient and cautious award that means far less than it should.
Unsurprisingly, the Nobel committee didn’t opt with that course of action – but worthy as she may be on the merits, Corina Machado’s selection as this year’s winner is clearly both a tactical and a political choice. It might also be a brilliant one.
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Stupid as it is, the reality is that Norway risks facing political and diplomatic repercussions for not awarding the Nobel Peace Prize this year to Donald Trump, just as they faced ridicule had they given it to him.
By awarding it to a Venezuelan opposition leader, Norway has attempted to blunt most of those attacks.
The Trump White House has made its opposition to Venezuela’s regime clear – and has been extrajudicially bombing boats off its coast. Suggesting Corina Machado was an unworthy winner would be to indirectly affirm Venezuela’s dictatorship. Even within Maga world, some will feel obliged to grin and bear this winner, and those who still speak out might do so less fervently than they would have otherwise.
This is no-one’s conception of how something as high minded as the Nobel Peace Prize “should” work, but perhaps it is a good reminder of the realities of how the diplomacy that keeps us all alive really works. International relations, diplomacy and peace are often the result of grubby deals and trade-offs. Perhaps the prize can teach us more than it first appears.
As for Trump, he has more than three years left to serve of his second presidential term. That’s three more attempts at the Nobel Peace Prize while he’s still in office. So, there’s always next year – and who knows? If he actually manages to make his Gaza peace deal stick, perhaps he might even earn it.
Peace is a grubby thing, after all.
James Ball is the political editor of The New World
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