The prospect of President Donald Trump claiming the Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 has been dismissed as “completely unthinkable” by a historian in Oslo, Norway, where the coveted awards are based.
Trump said previously it would be an “insult” to the United States if he did not win the Nobel Peace Prize and he has been backed in his quest by a host of other nations, as Breitbart News reported.
Seven world leaders have already formally presented their nominations for the U.S. president.
These include the heads of the governments of Armenia and Azerbaijan for Trump’s role in peacemaking in the region; the leaders of Gabon and Rwanda for Trump’s role mediating between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC); and the leaders of Cambodia, Pakistan, and Israel.
Experts in Oslo, where the award is based, beg to differ. They say he has virtually no chance due to his “America First” policies and “divisive style.”
“It’s completely unthinkable,” Oeivind Stenersen, a historian who has conducted research and co-written a book on the prize, told AFP.
Trump “is in many ways the opposite of the ideals that the Nobel Prize represents”, he claimed.
“The Nobel Peace Prize is about defending multilateral cooperation, for example in the U.N…. and Trump breaks with that principle, he follows his own path, unilaterally,” he added.
“The Nobel Committee should assess whether there have been clear examples of success in that peacemaking effort,” the head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Karim Haggag, told AFP while challenging Trump’s claimed successes on the world stage.
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Tens of thousands of people are eligible to submit a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize with 338 individuals and organisations this year known to have been nominated but their names are kept secret for 50 years.
The Nobel Committee was criticised for awarding former U.S. President Barack Obama the prize in 2009 before he came into office.
In 2015, the former head of the committee, Geir Lundestad, expressed regret for the award, saying “even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake.”
In his 2020 memoirs, President Obama recounted being informed he had won the prize from his then-advisor Robert Gibbs, to which he replied, “For what?”
Trump was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize previously in 2020 by Swedish lawmaker Magnus Jacobson for his efforts during his first term in office to mediate peace between Kosovo and Serbia.
His work in normalizing relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was also cited.
The Nobel Prize consists of a diploma, a gold medal and a cheque for around $1.2 million. This year’s winner will be announced on Friday, October 10.
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