Trolling the international community, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nominated President Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize this week for his diplomatic efforts procuring a ceasefire between Israel and Iran and building diplomatic relations between Israel and its Sunni Arab neighbors. 

Only four presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. These are some of our worst leaders. Trump doesn’t deserve the indignity of being on that list. 

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Roosevelt won the award for helping negotiate the end of the Russo-Japanese War, one of the first instances of American intervention in international diplomacy. Fair enough. 

Wilson, though, had promised neutrality in any European conflict in his 1913 campaign. His campaign slogan was “He Kept Us Out of War.” By 1917, we were in it, breaking the stalemate and likely ensuring another war. Wilson was handed the award in 1920 for his role in founding the League of Nations, one of the components of his 14-point post-war peace plan. Though the Nobel committee was impressed by the president’s technocratic ideas, Americans were less so. The United States never even ratified entrance into the League, and Europe plunged into another World War soon enough.

In 2009, Barack Obama didn’t even have to fail to win. His nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” was famously filed a mere 12 days after he took office. 

Then again, Obama’s presidency was imbued with a messianic fervor that allowed elites, both domestically and abroad, to preemptively celebrate his unrealized accomplishments. Retrospectively, the problem isn’t that Obama had done nothing exceptional in his first two weeks on the job, but that it’s challenging to think of any important foreign policy accomplishment from the next eight years, either. 

Perhaps his most notorious achievement was needlessly destabilizing Libya. Or maybe it was shielding Iranian nuclear and ballistic weapons programs. Then again, consistently botching Syria was no small feat. Nor was failing to either solidify control of Afghanistan or extracting American troops, as he had promised. The Paris Agreement, which Obama never bothered to bring to Congress for ratification, was, like its champion, bereft of substance.  

Now, I suppose attempting to lift Obama’s prestige was no less rational than handing former vice president Al Gore a peace prize in 2007 for his “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change.” This was the heyday of An Inconvenient Truth, a 2006 work of metafiction in which Gore made a slew of alarmist predictions regarding the global apocalypse, none of which have come close to transpiring. There are numerous scientists and entrepreneurs that have created a better, more peaceful world. Al Gore is not one. 

Ronald Reagan did not win the Nobel Peace Prize for helping trigger the collapse of the Soviet Union or setting the stage for the ensuing calm. Instead, in 2002, Jimmy Carter was awarded a Nobel “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.” It was a disgrace. 

Carter rarely met a communist dictator that didn’t impress him, calling Edward Gierek of Poland one of the most “enlightened leaders” of the world and Marshal Tito “a man who believes in human rights” and Nicolae Ceaușescu a champion of “human rights,” and so on. Carter advocated for Daniel Ortega’s reign and legitimized one bogus election after the next to keep Hugo Chavez in power. Carter also famously “brokered” a treaty with North Korea in 1994, undercutting Bill Clinton’s efforts to stop it from obtaining nuclear weapons. 

For two decades, Carter begged the West to normalize Hamas and fostered a deep “fondness” for Yasser Arafat, the godfather of modern terrorism. Arafat, of course, was perhaps the most notorious recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, winning it in 1994, only a few years before rejecting the first Palestinian state and plunging the region into two Intifadas. 

In any event, Carter never advanced the cause of “human rights” much less peace anywhere. 

The same can’t be said of Trump. No, we don’t know how history turns out, but we do know the Islamic Republic, the force behind virtually every ongoing conflict in the Middle East, has been critically weakened, its nuclear program likely incapacitated. It should be remembered that this action was taken only after Trump offered Iran a peaceful means of ending the conflict — even after Israel’s offensive. 

Trump also supported Netanyahu’s decapitation of Hezbollah, allowing Lebanon a chance at peace. Meanwhile, Israel sent Bashar Assad into Russian exile, allowing Syria a chance to strike a peace deal, as well. Sooner or later the Gaza operation will end, and it is unlikely Hamas will be in charge. In his first term, Trump initiated the Abraham Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Arab states like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. Trump has cleared the decks for bringing in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Syria.

Somewhat lost in the Middle East news is the fact that Trump has procured a promise from NATO members to significantly increase their contributions from 2% of military spending to 5% by 2035. Who knows if European nations will honor those commitments? But numerous presidents, including Obama, have tried and failed on this front. The agreement strengthens the alliance as well as ensuring that Europe has a larger stake in its own future.

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These achievements are likely to be more consequential than those of any presidential winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.  

None of which is to say there are no worthy recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2023, for example, the committee awarded the prize to Narges Mohammadi, an Iranian champion of human rights being held in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. But when it comes to international leaders, the Nobel is far more likely to be awarded for the right aesthetics and posture than results.