Why Donald Trump deserves a prize for warmaking not peace - Andy Brown
Every year when the Nobel prizes are awarded there is another contest for notable achievements that deserves our attention. The Ig Nobel awards go to pieces of scientific research which don’t appear to advance the sum total of human knowledge to any significant degree.
One recent contender did research into whether human hair tends to curl in a different direction in the Southern hemisphere than it does up here in the north. Another researcher had spent a lot of time and effort proving that people who are recorded as having lived a long time tend to come from places that had very poor record keeping at the time of their births. Who knew?
Ridiculous as some of these pieces of research are, it is doubtful whether they are quite so ludicrous as the concept that the President of the United States is such a wonderful deal maker that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
To get that award it tends to be necessary to make some actual progress in ending a conflict. Making conflicts worse doesn’t usually cut the mustard.
During his first Presidency Donald Trump met twice with the Supreme Leader of North Korea in an effort to persuade him to stop spending enormous sums of money on nuclear weapons and rockets.
Not one single practical achievement emerged from those negotiations. Instead, the Dear Leader of North Korea has better rockets and is sending young men to die in Putin’s war in Ukraine.
The man who seems to want to be the Dear Leader of Greater USA has also failed in his efforts to negotiate with Putin. The Russian dictator was more than willing to arrive in Alaska and be greeted with a red carpet and the opportunity to be warmly welcomed personally at the airport by the US President. What he was not willing to do was to recognise the right of the people of Ukraine to live in peace and freedom under a government that has been freely elected with a press that can publish what it chooses.
Putin’s attitude towards any genuine commitment to a peace deal has now become clear. He launched the largest ever missile attack on civilian targets in Ukraine. He launched yet more bloody failed attempts to make significant progress on the battlefield. He attended the Chinese President’s summit and stated in no uncertain terms that no independent troops would ever be allowed onto Ukrainian soil to guarantee any deal. He doubled down on his insistence that Ukraine should not be an independent nation. And then, just to tweak the tail, he launched a deliberate drone attack on Poland that he then immediately claimed was a small mistake.
Being weak and accommodating to the Russian dictator has worked every bit as badly as being weak and accommodating to the North Korean one.
It is, however, his policies in the Middle East which have most effectively illustrated Trump’s unsuitability for any peace prize. It isn’t hard to justify the use of military force to defend a people against a terrorist attack that kills attendees at a pop concert and captures hostages. It is much harder to ignore the evidence that a line has been crossed and collective punishment of the most brutal kind is now underway in Gaza and in the West Bank.
What the Israeli government is now doing is not proportionate or reasonable or in the best long term interests of any of the people of Israel. With the possible exception of ultra nationalist members of Netanyahu’s Cabinet who seem hell bent on genocide.
In such circumstances it was not the act of a great peace maker to issue a video showing himself sat in a wonderful new beach resort created after Gaza has been cleaned out of the awkward presence of a couple of million Palestinians. That simply incited ethnic cleansing.
Great peace makers don’t stay quiet whilst organisations like Oxfam or the Red Cross/Crescent are not allowed to deliver aid to starving people. They don’t supply weapons to help bomb hospitals and systematically destroy homes and kill children. Nor do they excuse and encourage ‘settlements’ and ‘annexations’ on the West Bank created by forcing people of one particular race off land their families have owned for generations at the point of a gun.
Nobel Peace prize winners don’t tend to supply the arms used to bomb Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen and now Qatar.
The rulers of Oatar thought they were buying US favour by supplying President Trump with a very expensive private jet.
When those who try to be your allies get bombs dropped on them by aircraft built in your country whilst your enemies get free publicity then it seems more appropriate to award a prize for warmaking than peacekeeping.
As for those who invited Donald Trump to take tea with the King of Canada at a time when that nation and Greenland are being threatened with annexation a different kind of award seems merited. For shaming the British nation by failing to stand beside its true allies at a time when they most needed it, Sir Keir Starmer must be in line for an Ig Nobel Peace Prize.
Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.