Submitted by Issues & Insights Editorial Board,
For a brief window this week, President Donald Trump was out of the running for a Nobel Peace Prize, after a Ukrainian lawmaker withdrew his nomination on Monday for not ending the war there, and before Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., nominated him on Tuesday for the ceasefire between Israel and Iran.
You can imagine the guffaws and hair-pulling from the Trump-is-Hitler crowd at the thought that anyone would see him as a suitable candidate for this prize.
But as much as we’d love to watch their heads explode as he walked up to accept the award, we think Trump should take himself out of the running.
Sure, he probably did more for world peace when he bombed Iran’s nuclear sites than any president since Ronald Reagan did when he left Michael Gorbachev high and dry at Reykjavík and sparked the end of the Soviet Union.
But why in the world would Trump want to join the ranks of other Nobel Peace Prize winners?
This is an award that was given to Yasser Arafat, a man once described as the “Father of Modern Terrorism” and who, two years after taking home the prize money, declared that:
“We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion … We Palestinians will take over everything.”
It was given to Jimmy Carter, now the second-worst president in U.S. history after Joe Biden, whose weakness led to the Iranian revolution, a year-long hostage crisis, and Soviet Union advances around the world.
And does Trump really want to share an honor bestowed on Al Gore, whose only real claim to fame is getting fabulously rich by spreading lies and misinformation about “global warming”?
He’d also be joining the likes of Rigoberta Menchú, whose autobiography was later attacked as fraudulent and who the Center for the Study of Popular Culture described as a “Marxist terrorist now exposed as an intellectual hoax.”
But more embarrassing than all of these (as well as other dubious winners such as Le Duc Tho, Henry Kissinger, the European Union, Mikhail Gorbachev – not Reagan – etc.) is that Trump would be accepting a prize that was given to Barack Obama nine months into his presidency on the basis of …. absolutely nothing.
Like Carter before him and Biden after him, Obama showed the dangers to peace from weakness. On his watch, Russia invaded Crimea, ISIS ran wild, and Iran used his sweetheart deal to advance its nuclear ambitions. And it was this “champion of peace” who would go on to authorize more than 560 missile attacks in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, one of which killed a U.S. citizen, for which he apologized. Others hit a wedding party and a funeral.
Human Rights Watch concluded that two Obama-authorized attacks “were in clear violation of international humanitarian law – the laws of war – because they struck only civilians or used indiscriminate weapons.” Four others “may have violated the laws of war because the individual attacked was not a lawful military target or the attack caused disproportionate civilian harm.”
Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning Obama would later be accused by Cornell West and others of being a war criminal.
Why would anyone want to be associated with this crowd?
If Trump were to turn down the award and call the Nobel Prize committee out for its wretched history of lionizing leftist terrorists, liars, and imbeciles, he’d do even more to advance world peace than any of its recipients.