“I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize,” the comedian Steven Wright once joked. This may be unironically true of President Donald Trump. But of course you are not meant to kill for this award. And because the prize cannot be won through threats, bribery, or any of Trump’s other customary tools, his only remaining avenue is to actually encourage peace. Which, amazingly enough, appears to be happening.
The newly announced agreement between Israel and Hamas may or may not develop into a genuine peace deal. At a minimum, however, it appears likely to result in the release of the remaining hostages.
It is apparent that the agreement grew directly out of Trump’s desperate thirst for the Nobel. Although he has whined in public about not getting the award—“I deserve it, but they will never give it to me,” he said at the White House in February—he seems to have grasped that winning it requires actual diplomacy. Accordingly, he has engaged in activities such as pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to support a plan to end the war, threatening Hamas with total destruction, negotiating with Arab states, and other normal presidential behavior.
This same impulse has reshaped his policy toward Russia and Ukraine. At the outset of his term, Trump adopted his customary pro-Russian stance, blaming Ukraine for having started the war and attacking the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office for being insufficiently grateful for U.S. aid.
But Trump’s posture has changed. The administration has halted the flow of some weapons to Ukraine, but it hasn’t stopped intelligence support. Trump seems to have realized that Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t stop the war until he has either conquered Ukraine or destroyed its sovereignty, and that Ukraine won’t submit. Ergo, the thing that stands in the way of a peace deal, and hence Trump’s peace prize, is Putin.
Having been forced to choose between his habit of believing everything Putin says and his hope of winning a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump has chosen the latter. This is a good thing.
To be sure, Trump’s desperate thirst to win this prize is of a piece with his general insatiable need to be flattered and praised—a desire that spurs plenty of bad choices, such as pushing to have anybody who opposes him thrown into prison. But in this case, it can be credited with inspiring his most constructive, prosocial impulses as president.
The challenge the prize committee faces is that if dangling the award in front of Trump encourages him to work hard to end conflicts, and perhaps to not start new ones, then they have to wonder what will happen if he gets it. Once given, these awards can’t be revoked. A Trump who has secured his Nobel Peace Prize might feel tempted to go after the ego gratifications that come with military conquest. (He is already dipping his toes into these waters within his attacks on “Venezuelan drug smugglers,” who may or may not be drug smugglers or even Venezuelans.)
In an ideal world, the possibility of creating peace would be all the motive Trump needs to try to make it happen. But if the ego gratification of an award from a Norwegian committee didn’t encourage leaders to work harder to end conflicts, the award wouldn’t have been created in the first place.
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