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Following President Donald Trump‘s announcement that Israel and Hamas have agreed to phase one of a peace plan on Wednesday, The New York Times’ David E. Sanger argued that his role in securing the deal could be the president’s “pathway to the Nobel Peace Prize.”
“For Mr. Trump, success in this venture is the ultimate test of his self-described goal as a deal maker and a peacemaker — and a pathway to the Nobel Peace Prize he has so openly coveted,” Sanger wrote on Wednesday.
The New York Times White House correspondent maintained that Trump is on the brink of the “biggest diplomatic accomplishment of his second term,” but warned that peace in the region is still far from guaranteed.
“If the peace plan moves forward, Mr. Trump may have as legitimate a claim to that Nobel as the four American presidents who have won the peace prize in the past, though with less bombast and lobbying,” he wrote.
“Much could go wrong in coming days, and in the Middle East it often does,” Sanger cautioned. “The ‘peace’ deal Mr. Trump heralded on Truth Social on Wednesday evening may look more like another temporary pause in a war that started with Israel’s founding in 1948, and has never ended.”
While expressing skepticism about the deal’s longevity, Sanger acknowledged that if Trump manages to sustain it, it would be an “extraordinary step toward the kind of peace plan Mr. Trump, and his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., have pressed to accomplish, despite many diversions down dark holes.”
“And if Mr. Trump can get Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to withdraw troops from Gaza City and give up on his plan to take control of the shattered remains of Gaza, if he can stop the carnage that has killed 1,200 people in Israel and more than 60,000 Palestinians, he will have done what many before him tried: outmaneuvered a difficult and now isolated ally,” he added.
Sanger hailed the Abraham Accords — which normalized relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and several other Middle Eastern countries — as Trump’s “best international accomplishment” of his first term, but noted that the peace deal he’s currently brokering “is an even bigger accomplishment.”
He also praised Trump and his administration for reining in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the bloody war in Gaza took a toll on Israel’s reputation, which Sanger argued “may take a generation or more to repair.”
Still unsure whether the peace deal between Israel and Hamas would hold up long-term, Sanger cautioned that it is “far from clear that the conflict is truly ending,” noting that getting Hamas to surrender its arms and control over Gaza may prove to be a much more difficult task.
Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama are the other four U.S. presidents who have won the Nobel Peace Prize. Carter was awarded his in 2002, more than 20 years after his term ended, while the others were awarded while in office.
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