AMERICA’S POLITICS, NORWAY’S MEDAL

THE refusal of the Norwegian Nobel Committee to entertain Donald Trump for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, despite his querulous, absurdist demands, has swung the spotlight on the prize itself.

- KAJAL BASU

The revelatory fragility of its longstanding rules, the monoethnic—indeed, mononational—constitution of the selection committee, and the dubitable nature of the awardees.

The reasons for Trump’s defeasance are several: his inexistent humanitarian record; that the nominations closed on January 31, months before seven countries decided to plug his bid; and that he had not been nominated by ‘leading lights’ in categories the Norwegian Nobel Committee lists.

How then did Barack Obama crack the prize in 2009? How did the nominator/s know before he became president how he would fare on matters of peace and humanitarianism, the basic tenet of the prize? Obama went on to become a militaristic expansionist, even stunning attendees at the award ceremony by calmly declaring that war was often “morally justified”.

Nominations for the following year’s peace prize begin online in mid-October. Before the 2009 nominations, Obama was a junior senator with zero “international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” credits. The credits applied to his nomination were probably unspecific—which must also have been true of Trump’s nominators.