Most of the stories related to the death of former President Jimmy Carter noted that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 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.” Carter is one of four U.S. presidents to win the prize — the others were Theodore Roosevelt (1906), Woodrow Wilson (1919), and Barack Obama (2009). Of the four, only Roosevelt deserved the honor, which recognized his work mediating the end of the Russo-Japanese War.
Let’s start with Obama. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the 44th president of the United States during his first year in office was ridiculous. Obama won the award for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” and for his “vision” of a world free of nuclear weapons. Obama in his first year went on an apology tour to the Middle East during which he asked forgiveness for past American sins, attempted to reach out to our sworn enemies in the Islamic world (especially Iran), and continued to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan. He accomplished nothing that warranted a Nobel Peace Prize.
Woodrow Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “his role as founder of the League of Nations.” Yet Wilson failed to persuade his own country to join the League, stubbornly refusing to compromise on any issue with Republicans in the Senate. The League was ineffectual. It did not preserve peace. In fact, the “peace” provisions negotiated by Wilson and other allied leaders set the stage for the most destructive war in human history. Wilson’s peacemaking efforts were a disastrous failure.
Jimmy Carter’s one claim to fostering peace was his mediation of the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt (it was, however, Nixon and Kissinger who mediated and end to the 1973 war between Israel and its enemies), but that achievement paled in comparison to his many failures that made the world a much more dangerous place. His foreign policy, which advocated “human rights” and arms control, worsened human rights in Nicaragua, Iran, and Afghanistan, and his arms control efforts ceded nuclear superiority to the Soviet Union. In his post-presidential years, Carter outrageously attempted to subvert the coalition established by George H. W. Bush to counter Iraq’s aggression in the Persian Gulf in 1990 by lobbying Arab governments and others to withdraw from the coalition. Had Carter had his way, Saddam Hussein would have remained in control of the oil fields of Kuwait and been left in a position to threaten Saudi Arabia. Carter later conducted his own diplomacy with the North Korean communist regime without sanction from the Clinton administration. And in 2007, Carter wrote a book titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid that effectively blamed our ally Israel for all of the problems in the Middle East.
Ronald Reagan’s policies, which won the Cold War without firing a shot, fostered greater peace and human rights than anything Carter, Obama, or Wilson did, but the Nobel committee did not award the peace prize to Reagan. Similarly, Richard Nixon ended the Vietnam War (the fragile peace that followed was undermined by a Democratic congress) and oversaw the mediation ending the Yom Kippur War, but Nixon did not get the peace prize, either. Nixon, too, had a greater claim to the Nobel Prize than Carter, Obama, or Wilson.
Donald Trump in his first term oversaw the successful negotiation of the Abraham Accords. Should Trump in his second term negotiate and end to the terrible war in Ukraine, he, too, would warrant consideration for the Nobel Peace Prize. But don’t hold your breath on that one, either.
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