A peace prize for Trump?

So, is there a Nobel Peace Prize looming in President Donald Trump’s future? After all, his predecessor was awarded one merely for turning up to work.

President Barack Obama was awarded it after only eight months in office. The decision was obviously based on what he might do, rather than what he had done. The committee made big of small scraps, writing that Obama’s award was: “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

On these principles, had Obama not been awarded the Peace Prize so hastily in 2009, it is unlikely that he would have got it at all. While he did strengthen multinational institutions and approaches to problems like climate change, he must have confounded Nobel hopes when he turned out to be a bellicose president.

He failed to end US involvement in Iraq and Iran as promised. There were the interventions in Egypt, Libya and Syria, which were similarly disastrous. And Obama’s attempts to achieve peace between the Israelis and Palestinians were similarly failures.

So, is there any hope of Trump replicating Obama’s achievement? If an internationally admired president can get a Nobel for nothing, a despised one can get it for something. It’s unlikely, given his disdain for multilateralism and nuclear arms treaties alone. There are also his combative utterances and unnerving erraticism, as shown in the kiss-kill-kiss relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.

However, that doesn’t mean that he might not deserve it, depending on how things play out in the Middle East. Trump’s nomination, which is for next year’s prize, is based on the president’s brokering of the so-called Abraham Agreement, the normalisation of full diplomatic ties between the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on the one side and Israel on the other.

Palestinians loathe this. They’ve called it a “stab in the back” and a betrayal by friends. They’re absolutely right. But sometimes it takes such an Et tu, Brute moment to shake loose the shackles of some of the entrenched, delusionary obsessions – for example, that Palestine can recover its 1948 borders – that have bedevilled all peace attempts to date.

Although there has been over the past decade a slow rapprochement between Israel and its neighbours, the only diplomatic relationships, prior the Abraham Agreement, was with Egypt in 1970 and Jordan in 1994. In fact, the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative almost two decades ago established as the baseline that until there was an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, no Arab state would establish diplomatic ties with Israel.

Trump has flipped that on its head, putting great political pressure on the Palestinians. If more Arab states sign up, that pressure will increase exponentially. While a Nobel Peace Prize would, of course, delight Trump, what is of more concern to him right now is winning a second term and avoiding the Order of the Boot.

He will be counting on the Abraham Agreement to help narrow the lead that Joe Biden holds over him going into the final stretch. At this stage, the odds are that when next year’s Nobels are announced, Trump will be neither a peace laureate nor a president.

One hopes that the Abraham Agreement has a better fate.

William Saunderson-Meyer.

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