Ahead of the meeting this Friday, August 15 between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska, Europeans worry that the US president might turn out to be the new Neville Chamberlain – the British prime minister who, along with the French premier Paul Daladier, gave Czechoslovakia up to Hitler at the 1938 Munich Conference. Trump, however, sees himself as a future Nobel Peace Prize laureate. "They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize," he said in February, during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office. "It's too bad. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me." He has continued to repeat these words ever since.

Since his first term in office, Trump has regularly described himself as a man of peace. With the United States worn down by its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he emphasized that he is the first president since Jimmy Carter to not have deployed any US soldiers in a conflict abroad – an accurate statement. Since January, and his return to the White House, he has repeated that the war in Ukraine, which he dubbed "Biden's war," referring to his predecessor, and Hamas' terrorist attack on Israel, on October 7, 2023, would never have happened if he had been president. His second term has been characterized by his campaign for the Nobel Prize.

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