Trump unlikely to win Nobel Peace Prize as Iran war weighs

Donald Trump is unlikely to win this year's Nobel Peace Prize as the US wages war with Iran, but experts say his influence could shape the committee's choice.US President Donald Trump will not win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize as he wages war with Iran, but his influence will still be felt by the awarding body that picks the laureate, according to experts. Last year’s award, to Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado, was unique in the prize’s 125-year history, coming amid repeated lobbying by Trump to get the award. Weeks later, Machado gave her gold Nobel medal to Trump, in a bid to win support for her efforts for a democratic Venezuela. This year, the five-strong body will be mindful of picking someone who can withstand pressure from Trump, according to Haakon Gjerloew, acting director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. “I think last year’s events around the Nobel Peace Prize, Maria Corina Machado giving it to Trump afterwards, will affect some of the considerations that they make,” he told Reuters. Nobel Peace Prize previous winners MARTIN LUTHER KING The leader of the US civil rights movement was “the first person in the Western world to have shown us that a struggle can be waged without violence”, according to the then-chairman of the award body, Gunnar Jahn. “He is the first to make the message of brotherly love a reality in the course of his struggle, and he has brought this message to all men, to all nations and races.” At 35, he was also the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate at the time. Today the youngest winner is Pakistan’s education campaigner Malala Yousafzai, who was 17 when she won in 2014. NELSON MANDELA The Nobel Peace Prize has been controversial on many occasions, but most agreed in 1993 that Mandela winning the award was “self-evident”, according to Geir Lundestad, the then-secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Mandela spent 27 years in prison and still called for a peaceful transition to end apartheid in South Africa. What was not self-evident was awarding the prize jointly with Frederik Willem de Klerk, the last white leader of South Africa, Lundestad said in his 2015 memoir. Many said Mandela should have won alone, while others said Mandela could not make peace without a counterpart, recounted Lundestad. In the end, the prize was given to both to encourage the peaceful transition to a democratic South Africa, which was not completed by the time of the award. HENRY KISSINGER AND LE DUC THO Among the most controversial awards was the 1973 honouring of top US diplomat Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho for reaching the January 1973 Paris Peace Accords, under which Washington completed a military withdrawal from South Vietnam. The committee’s decision shocked many at the time as Kissinger played a major role in US military strategy in the final stages of the 1955-75 Vietnam War. Le Duc Tho refused the prize on the grounds peace had not yet been established. Two of the five committee members resigned in protest. Kissinger, while accepting the award, did not travel to Norway for the ceremony and later tried in vain to return the prize. Internal documents released in 2023 showed the then-committee gave the award in the full knowledge the Vietnam War was unlikely to end any time soon. AUNG SAN SUU KYI Suu Kyi was one of a string of human rights campaigners in the 1990s to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. One of the few women to win the award, she was honoured for her non-violent struggle for democracy against the military dictatorship in Myanmar. For years she was hailed as one of the best recipients of the award, but that changed after the Myanmar military in 2017 carried out mass killings and gang rapes “with genocidal intent” against the Rohingya Muslim minority, according to a United Nations investigation. Suu Kyi, who led Myanmar’s civilian government at the time, has been criticised for failing to speak out against the army crackdown against the Rohingya. In 2021, following a military coup, Suu Kyi was arrested again. The 81-year-old has been detained ever since and her health is ailing, according to her son. MAHATMA GANDHI He was on the committee’s internal discussion list of candidates on five different occasions, with the body prepared to award him in 1948, the year he was assassinated, according to Lundestad. The committee could still have given him the prize posthumously – it was possible at the time but no longer is – but did not. According to Lundestad, it may be because the committee did not want to offend Norway’s close ally Britain, the former colonial power in India, or because the politics of Gandhi may have been perceived as too “foreign” or “anti-modern” by members of a Europe-centric committee. The violence of India’s partition could also have played a part, he said. At least 1 million people were killed and 15 million were uprooted. In any case, “among the omissions, Mahatma Gandhi stands in a class of his own”, wrote Lundestad in his memoir. “It is of course extremely unfortunate that the 20th century’s leading spokesman for non-violence never received the Nobel Peace Prize.” ALL WINNERS “One worry the committee might have is whether awarding it to someone could put them under pressure from Donald Trump … I think the committee will consider whether the award does more harm than good.” That could mean an award to Pope Leo, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice or Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, experts say. The announcement is on October 9. Leo, the first US-born pope, has said he would continue to speak out against war, after the president called him “weak” for criticising the US conflict with Iran. The Pope’s encyclical on AI, his advocacy for dialogue and the peaceful resolution of conflicts, his calls for respect for migrants and his humanitarian work could justify a prize. “The Pope stands (for) more than just as a religious figure. He has emerged as a leading thought leader,” Karim Haggag, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told Reuters. Italy’s Albanese, meanwhile, has been under fire from the US and Israel for her criticism of Israel’s conduct of its war against Hamas in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank. Committee could opt for safer choice To be sure, last year’s shock events could have the opposite effect on the committee: go for a safe, uncontroversial choice less likely to antagonise Trump, who blamed Norway, where the award is decided, for not giving him the accolade last time. That could mean recognising Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms, a Sudanese network of community groups providing aid during the civil war, or non-governmental group Save the Children for helping children in conflicts. But the committee is also under scrutiny to address Trump’s challenges to the international order the committee cherishes, said Oeivind Stenersen, a historian who has written about the Nobel Peace Prize. “They have a certain pressure … to be tough against Trump,” he told Reuters. “In this serious international situation, this year calls for a Peace Prize in defence of liberal democracy, international law and human rights.” International law in focus This could mean honouring the ICC at a time when Washington is preparing sweeping sanctions against the global tribunal, according to sources, while an award to the ICJ would support respecting the sovereignty of nation-states and resolving disputes peacefully. Trump has reportedly been nominated by the leaders of Cambodia, Israel and Pakistan, but his chances were “quite low”, according to Gjerloew. Trump’s pressure on the Norwegian Nobel Committee has stunned many, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa, a Filipino and American journalist, who said she watched last year with “horror”. “Bullies don’t run the world,” she told Reuters during a visit to Oslo in September. “There are standards we live by. Might doesn’t make it right.”