A Nobel for Donald Trump?

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s nomination of President Trump for the Nobel Prize in Peace is no doubt going to be met with a degree of cynicism. Yet it is hardly the craziest idea to come out of the Middle East. News that the premier of the Jewish state had nominated Mr. Trump apparently caught the president by surprise. “Thank you very much,” he gasped. “This I didn’t know. Wow. Coming from you, in particular, this is very meaningful.”Mr. Netanyahu, for his part, presented Mr. Trump with the letter of nomination at their dinner yesterday at Washington. The Israeli leader declared that “the president has already realized great opportunities. He forged the Abraham Accords. He’s forging peace as we speak, in one country and one region after the other.” Mr. Trump reiterated what he’s said all along: “I’m stopping wars. I’m stopping wars. And I hate to see people killed.”That, of course, is not, in and of itself, grounds for a Nobel in Peace. President Theodore Roosevelt won the prize in respect of his role, as the Nobel committee put it, “in bringing to an end the bloody war recently waged between two of the world’s great powers, Japan and Russia.” The Nobel committee praised TR as an “imperialist and peace arbitrator,” noting that he’d also played a role in arbitration to resolve our dispute with Mexico.Woodrow Wilson won the prize in 1919 for his scheming to establish the League of Nations. In our view it was an unconstitutional concept. It would have compromised American sovereignty. The League died, mercifully, in the saucer of the Senate, which, in 1919 and again in 2020, refused to ratify the treaty. Yet Wilson got the Nobel prize anyhow, as did President Obama, whom the Nobel organization honored nine months into his presidency.The Nobel committee cited Mr. Obama for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” and for his “vision of a world free from nuclear weapons.” In the event, Mr. Obama’s articles of appeasement with Iran also would have died in the Senate. They were endorsed only at the United Nations, where our envoy voted for the Iran pact despite what the Times called “overwhelming” opposition by both houses of Congress. President Carter received his Nobel a generation after his time in office and 23 years after he kissed the Soviet party boss, Leonid Brezhnev, at Vienna. Carter was cited “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” The chairman of the Nobel committee reckoned that Carter “ought to have been awarded the Prize as early as in 1978.”We’re not here to gainsay — or endorse — any of these prizes. For more than 30 years these columns have been nursing the idea that the Nobel Prize in peace ought to go to the American soldier, G.I. Joe. We see G.I. Joe and G.I. Jane as avatars of the American soldier and sailor who have been in harm’s way every day since the blasted Nobel Prize was invented — and always, in the case of our GIs, for the highest and most peaceable of ideals. Who could deserve the Nobel more?We mark that point not to undercut the proposed prize for Mr. Trump. He, after all, has plenty of standing, having twice been commander in chief of our GIs. Given the difficulties that lie ahead in the quest for peace in the Middle East and elsewhere, we take Mr. Netanyahu’s gesture yesterday as aspirational. That’s not nothing. It is part of a long quest that deserves to be nursed at every turn, even in the thick of the fight.

A Nobel for Donald Trump?

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