Opinion Give Trump the Nobel Please Prize

Heard the one about how to ingratiate yourself with the world’s most powerful man? Just give him the Nobel Please Prize. Thus might one joke about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nominating Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize — an accolade that the latter has made no secret of coveting. Coming shortly after Pakistan Army chief Asim Munir pledged to nominate the US President for the honour, perhaps the Norwegian Nobel Committee should consider the proposal seriously when it prepares to receive nominations in September.

That Trump hasn’t exactly achieved the results he claims — “I’m stopping wars”, he said at the dinner with the Israeli PM — is another matter. If this is not a time for war, neither is it a time of peace. But the Nobel Committee need not dwell on this; its own history shows that sometimes, intentions are enough, such as when US President Barack Obama, after a few months in office, was chosen as the 2009 Peace Laureate for his “vision of a world free from nuclear weapons”. Obama himself expressed shock, while the then secretary of the Prize, Geir Lundestad, confessed in 2015 that the decision had been “only partially correct”.

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One solution to ensure all future decisions are fully correct is to drop any connection to actual peace and hand out a Prize to all claimants. The Nobel Prize for Doing His Job, for example, could go to AAP national convener Arvind Kejriwal, who reportedly said that he deserved a Nobel for getting work done as Delhi Chief Minister “despite the L-G”. In a time when the work of peace is often limited to online petitions and Instagram reels, the instant gratification of such a Prize may be all that is really needed.