The refusal of the Norwegian Nobel Committee to entertain Donald Trump for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, despite his querulous, absurdist demands, has swung the spotlight on the prize itself. The revelatory fragility of its longstanding rules, the monoethnic—indeed, mononational—constitution of the selection committee, and the dubitable nature of the awardees.
The reasons for Trump’s defeasance are several: his inexistent humanitarian record; that the nominations closed on January 31, months before seven countries decided to plug his bid; and that he had not been nominated by ‘leading lights’ in categories the Norwegian Nobel Committee lists.
How then did Barack Obama crack the prize in 2009? How did the nominator/s know before he became president how he would fare on matters of peace and humanitarianism, the basic tenet of the prize? Obama went on to become a militaristic expansionist, even stunning attendees at the award ceremony by calmly declaring that war was often “morally justified”.
Nominations for the following year’s peace prize begin online in mid-October. Before the 2009 nominations, Obama was a junior senator with zero “international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” credits. The credits applied to his nomination were probably unspecific—which must also have been true of Trump’s nominators.
After it receives the nominees’ list in mid-February, the Norwegian Nobel Committee prepares a shortlist by end-March. By April-end, the advisors selected, according to the Nobel Peace Prize website “on the basis of their professional experience and academic expertise”, send in their initial character and suitability analyses. The committee then asks for “further reports on various candidates”. This back-and-forth continues until August. A majority vote is taken in the beginning of October.
Obama had ordered his first Predator drone strike—the hallmark of his two presidencies—on January 23, 2009, a week before the last nomination date. On February 17, when the longlist of nominees was received, Obama ordered 17,000 more troops into Afghanistan. On March 27, he unveiled a new escalatory strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. On what basis, then, did he get the golden gong?
The peace prize’s nomination-discussion-voting timeline is deeply questionable. As has been its choice of awardees since Henry Kissinger in 1973, which was a brazen disregard for the awfulness of this grey eminence of American realpolitik. In the 21st century, the peace prize has tended to go to political figures opposed to heads-of-state the US is geopolitically uncomfortable with.
This year it went to María Corina Machado, a conservative, US-aligned political figure stridently opposed to Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, an autocrat who is staunchly against American neoimperialism in Latin America and the Middle East-North Africa region. With multidecadal connections to US Republicans, she has long been a votary of American—and, oddly, Israeli—bellicosity in Venezuela. Not surprisingly, observers have wryly concluded that the 2025 prize might not have gone to Trump, but it went to a Trumpista who dedicated the trophy to him, which is why Trump isn’t exactly ticked off at having been overlooked (although he forgot her name while publicly thanking her for her devotion).
Narges Mohammadi, the 2023 awardee, is an Iranian human rights activist whose work has centred on fighting the oppression of women, and remains in jail at present. Year 2022 was bad for Iran-US relations—the collapse of the 2015 nuclear agreement’s revival, Iran’s suppression of domestic protests, its drone supply to Russia. In September 2023, the US unfroze $6 billion of Iranian money held in South Korea, which it transferred to Qatar with the caveat that they were to be used for US-defined “humanitarian purposes”. Iran never saw the money.
Ales Bialiatski, a pro-democracy human rights activist sent to the brutal Penal Colony No 9 in Belarus, was the 2022 awardee along with the Russian human rights organisation Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties. Belarus-US relations had tanked after the Alexander Lukashenko regime, in May 2021, forced a Ryanair flight to land to arrest popular dissident blogger Raman Dzmitryevich Pratasevich. The Biden administration protested volubly. Lukashenko bit back. Bialiatski got the peace prize in 2022. In 2023, he was sentenced to 10 years—a victim of Lukashenko’s autocratism, the Lukashenko-Biden feud, and Biden’s Russophobic overreach.
The 2021 prize went to two journalists, Filipina American Maria Ressa and Russian Dmitry Muratov. Both came into the limelight as opposition figures—Ressa against that thorn in the US’s flesh, Rodrigo Duterte, who had announced “separation from the United States” in 2016, and in early 2020 unilaterally abrogated the 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement, a linchpin of Philippines-US regional security.
And Muratov became known for bucking Vladimir Putin’s diktat against publishing uncleared information—or “knowingly false information” —on the Russo-Ukrainian war. In 2020, he had supported the protests in Belarus following Lukashenko’s fixed electoral victory. As a member of the Russian opposition party Yabloko, he had already been in Putin’s sights for a while.
While few of these laureates are undeserving, an American hand hovers above them all. The Nobel Peace Prize has never been nonpartisan—but now it is unabashedly political.
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)