For US presidents, Nobel Peace Prize long fraught with politics

MAYBE next year. It was perhaps not a coincidence that the announcement Friday of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for which US President Donald Trump has so openly campaigned coincided with his greatest foreign policy triumph to date — a widely praised ceasefire and hostage deal that, although still fragile, could be the beginning of the end of two years of war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

- KAREN TUMULTY

But it also came as Trump has sent troops into US cities over the objections of those who govern them, has goaded his compliant attorney general to prosecute his political enemies, and in other ways wielded executive power in a heavy-handed manner unlike any in modern US history.

So it could be read as a rebuke to Trump that the prize committee in Oslo awarded the honour to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who has led a movement against the authoritarian regime of Nicolas Maduro. She has been living in hiding since last year, when the presidential candidate she backed lost what was widely regarded as a rigged election.

Machado was lauded by the committee as “a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness”. Her admirers and supporters include US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who wrote earlier this year in Time magazine that she is “the personification of resilience, tenacity, and patriotism”.

She, meanwhile, has praised Trump's “courageous” and “visionary” policies toward her country, which recently have included attacking boats in the Caribbean that Trump has said were carrying drug smugglers.

However deep their mutual admiration, Machado’s pick brought sour grapes from the Trump White House. Communications director Steven Cheung issued a statement that the “Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace”.