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Keep Your Eyes on the Prize - The Nobel Peace Prize [1]
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Date: 2025-02-17
Trump is all about a number of things: Revenge, bullying, jealousy, wanting all the attention. All of that drives his foreign policy — but it’s also about the Nobel Peace Prize: Obama got one, and he did not. Donald Trump Makes The Pettiest Jealous Gripe About Barack Obama (from last October):
Donald Trump on Thursday complained that he doesn’t have a Nobel Peace Prize but fellow ex-President Barack Obama undeservedly does. . . . “If I were named Obama I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds,” he said [for the Abraham Accords].
So when Trump threatens Hamas with extinction, or Gaza with forced population removal, or Ukraine with being cut out of talks about its future as a country, all of that is driven by his insane desire to manufacture the appearance of being some kind of peacemaker in time for the Nobel committee in Oslo to give the prize to him this year.
There are other factors driving his foreign “policy” of course. Giving Putin whatever he wants is high on the list, as is throwing his weight around the world (our weight, which he is misusing) and forcing as much of the world as he can to bow to his whims, whether it be Greenland or Panama or Canada.
He also doesn’t understand multilateral negotiations and agreements; real estate deals are usually one-to-one, and also depend on the threat, real or implied, that if things don’t go his way, he can switch to another property down the street. Oh, and he also wants Ukraine’s rare earth mineral wealth. If he can extort it out of Ukraine, he can start hitting up the rest of the planet. That plus his view of the world as a zero-sum game, meaning that in order for him to be a winner, there has to be a loser. International peace-keeping arrangements absolutely do not work that way.
But Trump could care less. He has his eyes on the prize — the Peace prize. Like everything else he has done throughout his life, he plans to get it by bluffing and bullying and faking a short-term success. As always, once he gets what he wants, he will stiff his creditors — or in this case Ukraine — and walk off into the sunset polishing his medal.
This is from two days ago, in the Daily Mail: EDWARD LUCAS: Trump wants his Nobel Peace Prize whatever the cost to Ukraine, Europe and Britain…
Confused, contradictory and deeply concerning. That is the verdict at the Munich Security Conference on Donald Trump’s hectic first month in the White House. As the bigwigs hurtle between meetings, the alarm in the air is unmistakable. Chiefly because the Trump administration is in the driving seat and the Europeans are not even on the bus. Though his destination is unclear to many of us, what we do know is the US President wants a Nobel Peace Prize and believes a deal with Vladimir Putin will deliver it – no matter the cost to Ukraine, Europe and Britain.
It’s also about the bullying. He thinks he can bully the Oslo committee into giving him the prize, the way he has bullied everyone all his life. But he has no hold on the committee itself, so he may try to pressure European countries into leaning on them to get his way. If he succeeds, that will be an even more ominous sign (as if we needed one) that he is going to run roughshod over all the world’s norms and customs.
Watch this space.
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