The Nobel Prize is about character, not headlines

Trump’s Peace Prize fixation reveals more about him than about peace.

Nihon Hidankyo’s 2024 Nobel Peace Prize diploma (© The Nobel Foundation 2024)

I might be wrong, but I doubt the Nobel Committee will announce this week that any of the 2025 laureates spend summers at Mar-a-Lago.

Let’s put aside the absurdity of declaring yourself prize-worthy after every photo-op. Imagine Tom Hanks finishing a film or Bruce Springsteen releasing a single and immediately proclaiming: “Everyone is saying I was brilliant. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. All the awards, they belong to me.” Fox News would spend a week diagnosing a mental breakdown.

But Trump’s Nobel fixation isn’t parody; it’s a pattern. His declarations typically follow any diplomatic outcome—real, claimed, or engineered—that gives him a headline to control. The sequence is predictable: a lull, a headline, and a self-congratulation. Recognition, he insists, must follow.

Don’t forget this was the same man who told world leaders at the UN General Assembly last month: “I’ve been right about everything.”

The fixation almost certainly began years ago as a flattering aside from a subordinate. It survived not through institutional endorsement but through Trump’s repetition, amplified by a press content to relay as much as interrogate. Each retelling rests on a false assumption—that peace can be declared by announcement, that transactional “pressure” equates to peacemaking vision. That misstates the history and purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize and ignores how the committee has grown more guarded after being burned.

Trump and his allies don’t grasp that the Nobel is not a People’s Choice Award. The Peace Prize is decided by a five-member body appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. Its charge comes from Alfred Nobel’s will: to honor those who have most advanced fraternity among nations, reduced standing armies, or promoted lasting peace.

Nominations are submitted by a select group—parliamentarians, academics, former laureates—and kept confidential for 50 years. The committee’s deliberations are slow, insulated, and guided by impact rather than headlines. Crucially, the committee is fiercely independent: public campaigns and lobbying on behalf of candidates are discouraged and often counterproductive. Former Nobel Secretary Geir Lundestad noted that such lobbying triggers a “negative psychological response.

The Nobel Committee is acutely aware of the perils of premature accolades. Its most cautionary tale in recent memory is the 2019 prize to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for ending a border war with Eritrea. Less than a year later, Abiy launched a military campaign in Tigray, drawing international condemnation. In a rare public rebuke, the committee reminded Abiy of his duties as a laureate and expressed “deep concern” over atrocities in Tigray. The episode became a case study on the perils of a rushed honor.

That and similar experiences have instilled new caution. The committee has increasingly bestowed the award to humanitarian agencies and long-standing human-rights advocates, whose work carries durability and broad legitimacy.

In short, facts matter. So do deliverables.

So, let’s check the facts. At the United Nations in September, Trump claimed he ended wars from Congo to Kashmir. In reality, several of these were never wars at all (Egypt-Ethiopia, Kosovo-Serbia); others were violent clashes that produced ceasefires, not peace (Cambodia-Thailand, India-Pakistan, Israel-Iran); and where the United States coordinated agreements, such as Congo-Rwanda or Armenia-Azerbaijan, the violence either continued or the deal codified a military reality already decided on the ground. Fact-checkers from PolitiFact to the AP have made the same point: These were at best pauses, at worst public-relations stunts.

Ukraine and Gaza are two contests where Trump could have validated his peacemaker narrative. Instead, he has substituted promises for leverage. He campaigned by pledging to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. At the August Alaska summit with Russian President Vladmir Putin, he shifted from prior insistence on a ceasefire to backing negotiation without it. Following his September meeting at the United Nations with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, he pivoted again, proclaiming Ukraine can retake all its territory—a rhetorical swing that is less strategy, more improvisation.

In Gaza, Trump can claim credit for ceasefire talks, but the name says it all. On paper, this is the kind of outcome that would once have bolstered a Nobel case. Yet the path to it was anything but noble—two years of devastation that left most of Gaza in ruins, annexation threats, and political brinkmanship. Trump’s own tone when announcing the deal captured the hollowness of the moment. “We’ll see how it all turns out”—hardly the language of moral conviction. For the Committee, which has grown wary of celebrating peace that arrives only after destruction, the bar remains higher than a deal born of exhaustion and coercion—or, worse, one that sanctifies devastation as prelude to negotiation.

None of these maneuvers represents the kind of enduring peace the Nobel Committee seeks. They are unilateral, transactional moves, not comprehensive settlements that resolve underlying conflicts. The committee’s bar for “lasting peace” is higher than ever—and a brief pause in hostilities or a ribbon-cutting ceremony does not meet it.

If the Nobel Committee chooses to issue a signal in 2025, Gaza is a credible locus. The choice would not be a partisan endorsement but a spotlight on famine, siege, and the collapse of international norms. Figures and groups already in public discussion include Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, whose reports have documented possible war crimes; Israeli-Palestinian women’s peace coalitions, whose quiet work sustains fragile coexistence; and international responders such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

There is no shortage of others who reflect the substance the Nobel was meant to honor. They might or might not be this year’s laureates, but their persistence and moral clarity stand in stark contrast to Trump’s theater:

• Committee to Protect Journalists—An independent nonprofit founded in 1981 to safeguard press freedom worldwide, recognized for defending truth in war zones where reporters are silenced and for advocating on behalf of journalists facing imprisonment, harassment, or censorship.

• World Central Kitchen—A global humanitarian network founded in 2010 by Spanish-American chef José Andrés that has delivered meals from Haiti to Ukraine to Gaza and during COVID-19 pivoted to provide millions of ready-to-heat meals in U.S. neighborhoods.

• Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—A century-old movement for disarmament and gendered peace processes, included on the shortlist of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, a world-leading peace research organization.

The contrast could not be starker. On one side stand those whose work embodies the Nobel standard. On the other, Donald Trump clinging to photo-ops and proclaiming himself the deserving laureate.

He will not win the Nobel Prize for medicine for “discovering” that Tylenol causes autism (a false claim), nor the prize in economics for restoring “balance” through tariffs (he has fundamental lack of understanding of how trade works), nor the prize in literature for his book “Save America”—and the Peace Prize will not be his on October 10.

But maybe monkeys will fly.

Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech. His Safehouse Briefing Substack looks at what’s ahead in global security, geopolitics, and national strategy.

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