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Extract from Times article, republished in The Australian 9th August 2025.
“If I were named Obama I would have had the Nobel prize given to me in 10 seconds,” Donald Trump said last year, shortly before he won the US presidential election. And back in office, Mr Trump continues to vent his frustration that he has done more than the 44th president to merit the award. “They will never give me a Nobel Peace prize,” he said in February. “I deserve it but they will never give it to me.”
According to insiders, Mr Trump’s scramble for peace has been influenced by a display in the Roosevelt Room of the White House that shows the prize awarded to Theodore Roosevelt for negotiating the
In his inaugural address, Mr Trump was explicit that this was the reputation he wanted recorded in the history books. “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” he said.
In the coming weeks, Mr Trump will meet President Vladimir Putin for what could be the defining summit of his presidency – one that could rank in importance alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt’s carve-up of Europe with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at Yalta on the Black Sea in February 1945, or Ronald Reagan’s negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev on arms control in Reykjavik in Iceland in 1986.
“You know, we’ve solved five wars,” he said on Wednesday 6th August 2025, without specifying which they were. Some of the conflicts he may have in mind are: India and Pakistan 10 May; the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda 27 June; Cambodia and Thailand 7 August; and, shortly it seems, Armenia and Azerbaijan. He has said the bombing of Iran was in addition to the five conflicts he claims to have already resolved.
The other two, according to one of his aides, wereKosovo and Serbia as controversially declared by Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani on 10 July, and theYemen Middle East ceasefire on 6 May.
This weekend his quest for the Nobel Peace prize will reach the Caucasus, as he hosts the Prime Minister of Armenia and President of Azerbaijan for talks. Resolving the question of Nagorno-Karabakh was probably not what most US voters had in mind when they elected Mr Trump last year. In 2023, Azerbaijan effectively annexed the mountainous region and expelled its majority Armenian population, prompting allegations of ethnic cleansing. The US peace proposal would revive plans for a road, dubbed the “Trump bridge”, connecting Azerbaijan to Nakhchivan, an exclave in southern Armenia. In exchange, Armenia could use the road to normalise relations with Azerbaijan and Turkey, boosting trade.
Mr Trump may also use the negotiations as a way to strongarm Azerbaijan into joining the group of Muslim countries that recognised Israel under the 2020 Abraham Accords. Rich with natural gas from the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan has been purchasing Israeli weapons for many years and relations between the two countries are already close. Although ending the feud between Armenia and Azerbaijan is unlikely to improve the Republicans’ chances at next November’s midterm elections, Mr Trump’s focus may be on convincing a jury of five Norwegian dignitaries he has fulfilled the criteria outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel.
Top of Mr Trump’s list of achievements is likely to be ending the war between India and Pakistan, the two nuclear-armed neighbours that began fighting when gunmen killed 26 Indian tourists in the disputed region of Kashmir in April. There were dogfights over the Himalayas and India threatened to sever Pakistan’s water supply.
But neither side appeared ready for a protracted war and a truce was announced on May 10. Mr Trump claimed credit for brokering the peace. “After a long night of talks mediated by the United States, I am pleased to announce that India and Pakistan have agreed to a full and immediate ceasefire,” he wrote on Truth Social.
While Pakistan endorsed Mr Trump’s version of events and nominated him for the prize, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi dismissed his claims. John Bolton, Mr Trump’s national security adviser in 2018-19, said: “If you ask most Indian officials, and certainly their press, they’re outraged that Trump claims he had any influence on the thing at all.”
Another war Mr Trump believes was ended thanks to his diplomatic intervention is that between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. In his telling, the two sides put down their weapons after he promised investment from US mining companies in the resource-rich region of Kivu, in the east of the DRC, which was overrun by Rwanda-backed M23 rebels this year. “They were going at it for many years, and with machetes,” he said as he announced a ceasefire last month.
Mr Trump’s latest peace nomination has come from Cambodia. A skirmish on its border with Thailand last month escalated into an artillery war. He interrupted his golfing holiday in Scotland to call the leaders and, by offering to cut tariffs on the two from 36 per cent to 19 per cent, convinced them to announce a truce.
Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is another foreign leader to have nominated Mr Trump for the prize – citing his first-term negotiation of the Abraham Accords in 2020 – but so far Mr Trump has failed to make meaningful progress on Gaza, his biggest diplomatic challenge alongside Ukraine.
By bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, he believes he has already brought peace to the Middle East. He recently had a model of a B-2 Spirit Bomber installed in the Oval Office to commemorate his “flawless” success. “Every one of those bombs hit their target,” he said.
While Mr Trump may covet Mr Obama’s success, some believe he risks falling into a trap by so avidly pursuing the prize. History has proved a harsher judge of Mr Obama’s foreign policy than the 2009 prize committee, which cited his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” when it awarded him the prize less than a year into his presidency.
Mr Obama’s reset of relations with Russia despite its invasion of Georgia in 2008 arguably encouraged the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which in turn created the conditions for the war in Ukraine.
His administration also watched the 2011 Arab Spring ignite civil wars across the Middle East, seemingly powerless to intervene after the misadventures of Iraq. In particular, Bashar al-Assad’s flagrant violation of Mr Obama’s “red line” over the use of chemical weapons in Syria passed without punishment in 2013.
“The kiss of death is the early Nobel Peace prize,” one European diplomat said. “If Trump was awarded the prize at the end of his term – having been hawkish at the start, when necessary, but seeing it through to negotiated settlements – it would transform the very basis of international relations. If he gets it now, it will be cursed.
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