Although there are five Nobel Prizes — physics, chemistry, literature, medicine and peace — the Peace Prize is usually considered the most noble. (Pun totally intended.) Created after the will of wealthy inventor Alfred Nobel, the Peace Prize is meant to be given to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses.” Basically, people who have significantly contributed to global peace for that year are nominated. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to go.
A nominator this year had a very interesting idea of peace, and so they sent in the name of presidential candidate Donald Trump. Neither Gandhi nor Pope Francis received this award, to put things into perspective.
The name of the person who nominated him hasn’t been released, but their reason for submitting the nomination echoes the many Trump supporters around the nation. They believe that Mr. Trump deserves to win the Nobel Peace Prize due to his "vigorous peace through strength ideology, used as a threat weapon of deterrence against radical Islam, ISIS, nuclear Iran and Communist China.”
Peace through “threat weapons of deterrence” is, arguably, not real peace. Assertiveness might have been a better way to put it, but that’s a questionable criterion for judging someone’s peacemaking qualities. Not only that, but there’s a considerable amount of difference between the vigorous efforts of Malala Yousafzai to obtain human rights for girls — despite getting critically injured by the Taliban — and Donald Trump’s multiple statements that he is going to “bomb the hell out of ISIS.”
Trump’s foreign policy plans, while direct, do not seem to prioritize peaceful relations with other nations. Rather, he hopes to “build a wall” to keep out undocumented immigrants from Mexico, and proceed to make Mexico pay for it. He accuses Mexico of using illegal immigration to export their own criminals. He also calls Syrian refugees a “Trojan Horse” of potential threats, saying that the refugees could create “another problem” in America.
I don't know about you, but to me, this doesn’t make Mr. Trump seem like someone particularly peace-loving. It certainly doesn't seem like he's reducing standing armies, as Alfred Nobel wished — Trump plans to put troops on the ground to fight Islamic State militants. Trump may hold some foreign policy views that his supporters believe will solve international problems, but it remains that these proposed solutions aren’t what I would call peaceful. It seems that the Nobel Peace Prize team agrees.
This isn’t the first time someone largely controversial has been nominated for the Nobel; Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler have both been nominated in the past, but evidently never won the Prize. Thankfully, as was the case with Hitler and Putin, the Nobel evaluating team aren’t considering Trump as a front-runner for the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead, among the nominees with the highest chances are Edward Snowden and some nuclear negotiators between the U.S. and Iran. No matter who wins the Prize, though, it looks like they won’t have a strange blond cloud of hair and a penchant for the word China.