Shucking Oysters: How Nobel of You
By Alex Allen
Nitroglycerine, dynamite, ballistite. These are just some of the more famous inventions of Alfred Nobel, who held 355 patents during his lifetime. Nobel pursued many successful business ventures with his family, but what he is best known today for is the veritable Nobel Prize foundation.
Awarded annually, the prize categories are in: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. But few awards in the world command as much prestige or controversy as the Nobel Peace Prize. This prize is the most coveted of them all, particularly with world leaders. And no more so than with Donald Trump, who’s pursuit of the award borders on the obsessive.
Trump’s entire worldview seems predicated on a notion that life is unfair, Dave Schilling wrote in The Guardian. The system is rigged and he alone can balance the scales back toward justice. “This all makes sense as a rhetorical strategy, and it has proved popular in an age in which most people deem the American government to be about as straight as a bowl of chicken noodle soup. But it doesn’t play so well when his grievances are focused almost exclusively on himself and his own personal gripes.”
Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times that Trump’s “longing is partly inspired by his jealousy of Barack Obama, who absurdly got a Nobel Peace Prize after only eight months in office for just being a cool dude.” Expanding the US military’s domestic role and sending the National Guard to blue cities is basically declaring war on his own country. “Even if he says he should have won the Nobel five times over for his work solving foreign conflicts, he is creating conflicts in America, concocting perilous crises in American cities.”
Trump’s “conception of peace is performative and transactional, driven by media spectacles, symbolic agreements, and coercive diplomacy,” wrote Ihsan Faruk Kılavuz. The rise of performative peace underscores the urgent need to distinguish image from substance. Trump may understand the Peace Prize better than most, however, “as an award that too often rewards power over principle.”
The Nobel Peace Prize needs to return to its founding values: “recognizing those who pursue peace not as a political strategy but as a principled mission rooted in justice, nonviolence, and human dignity.” The first Peace Prize in 1901 was shared by Jean Henry Dunant of Switzerland and Frédéric Passy of France. Dunant was recognized “for his humanitarian efforts to help wounded soldiers and create international understanding” in founding the Red Cross and creating the Geneva Conventions. Passy was honoured “for his lifelong work for international peace conferences, diplomacy and arbitration.”
Peace does not come from drone strikes, dramatic threats of war, or being a bully. It comes from “genuine reconciliation, human rights protection, and long-term social transformation.” US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth glibly said “those who long for peace must prepare for war.” From Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and everything that has happened in that war until now, we see what “peace through strength” looks like. And it’s not pretty.
Minoo Khaleghi wrote in the International that the Nobel Peace Prize selection criteria has become increasingly political and power-driven and the winners have more often “legitimized radical, politicized, and even militaristic actions than celebrated genuine and institutionalized peace.”
There are countless examples of this contradiction between the award of peace and the actions of those who received the prize. When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 the announcement provoked outrage. How can he win for helping end the Vietnam War he started? Two Nobel Committee members resigned in protest. North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho, who was jointly awarded the prize with Kissinger, refused to accept it, for obvious reasons.
Barack Obama’s 2009 Nobel Peace award, after less than a year in office, was described as an “advance prize” granted for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Yet Barack’s government led more military operations since Bush Junior, “proving that his peaceful rhetoric and real-world actions were profoundly at odds.” Even Obama himself admitted to confusion over the honour, stating years later that he was unsure why he received it.
This year in October, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to María Corina Machado, leader of the right-wing opposition party in Venezuela, who was praised “as one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times.” Machado, in hiding, dedicated the award to the “suffering people of Venezuela” and to Donald Trump “for his decisive support of our cause.”
Machado joins the US administration in calling Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro the leader of a “criminal narco-terrorism structure” and has asked Trump for more help in unseating Maduro from power. She even asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to help “liberate” Venezuela with bombs. What is concerning is the massive deployment of US military force in the region, with over 10,000 US troops and dozens of aircraft and ships. The administration claims it is a counter-drug and counter-terrorism mission, but US officials have privately made it clear that the intent is to drive Maduro from power.
Faramarz Kouhpayeh wrote that Trump and Machado are “cut from the same right-wing authoritarian cloth,” which in part explains why Trump quickly congratulated her, and why Machado, in turn, dedicated her award to him. Khaleghi warned that in awarding the prize to Machado, the Nobel Committee has provided an open invitation for Trump to continue, and even “escalate, military intervention and gunboat diplomacy in Latin America.”
As Kılavuz sadly wrote: “In a world where Mahatma Gandhi once stood as the emblem of peace and non-violent resistance, we have reached a point where international arsonists portray themselves as peace icons and hide their atrocities beneath the shadow of the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Venezuelan activist Michelle Ellner said of María Corina Machado: “Anyone who knows what she stands for knows there’s nothing remotely peaceful about her politics.” The Nobel Peace Prize has a credibility problem; it needs to rise above the very forces it was created to challenge, otherwise it will continually be awarded to mediocre individuals whose chief qualities are greed, ego and a talent for manipulation.
