Donald Trump Deserves the Nobel Prize for War

On his recent tour of Asia, President Donald Trump picked up a number of gifts, including a golden replica of a Silla crown in South Korea and a golden golf club in Japan. Trump has a well-known penchant for gold: The Oval Office has been redecorated in gold, complete with gold trophies and golden coasters with Trump’s name on it.

Trump loves gold, but what he really covets, because it is much rarer, is a Nobel Peace Prize.

In the hopes of getting into the good graces of the US president, many world leaders have promised to nominate him for one. On this recent trip, he received such promises from the new conservative prime minister of Japan, Sanae Takaichi, as well as from Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet. Earlier this year, Park Sun-won of the now ruling Democratic Party submitted a nomination of Trump to the Nobel committee in Norway. Many other leaders around the world, from the Israeli prime minister to the foreign minister of Malta, have joined the chorus of adulation.

Like all the gold tributes paid to Trump, these nominations are naked attempts to flatter an erratic, cruel, and autocratic leader. They also fly in the face of reality.

One last reason why Donald Trump deserves a Nobel War Prize is his determination to increase the budget of what he now calls the War Department.

Trump, after all, no more cares about peace than a mafioso does. Both Trump and the mafioso want only that underlings follow their orders and adversaries cower in fear. Trump wants Russian leader Vladimir Putin to kowtow to the US president and come to the negotiating table with Ukraine. Trump wanted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop defying US pressure and negotiate with Hamas on a ceasefire in Gaza. Like a mafioso, Trump wants to demonstrate that he is the absolute authority who distributes favors and punishments according to his whims.

Trump often tries to change the fabric of reality by asserting the truth of absolute falsehoods—that former President Barack Obama was born in Africa, that the 2020 elections were stolen, that he’s the smartest person in every room.

So, too, with the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump boasts that he has ended “seven or eight” wars. It’s a questionable claim given that he was barely involved in negotiating ceasefires in several of those conflicts (Kashmir, Thailand vs. Cambodia) while some of the “successes,” like Gaza, remain largely unresolved. In the case of Egypt and Ethiopia, there wasn’t even a war to end.

Instead, through his rhetoric and actions, Trump deserves the opposite: a Nobel prize for war.

For the most part, Trump has been using tariffs as his favorite form of punishing friends and enemies alike. However, he also uses the threat of war, and here too he doesn’t necessarily distinguish between allies and adversaries. For instance, he has threatened to send troops to Greenland, which would set up a conflict with fellow NATO member Denmark. He has also threatened to annex Canada, a friendly neighbor.

More recently—and even more troubling—the Trump administration is seriously considering drone strikes and even the dispatch of US troops to Mexico to attack drug cartels. The Mexican government has strongly rejected any such plans, but that hasn’t deterred the Trump administration.

The possible plan to intervene in Mexico—against the wishes of the government—is an expansion of the drug war the administration is conducting in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It has already attacked more than a dozen ships and killed more than 60 people. The designation of a “war” by the Pentagon is fallacious since it is based on the notion that the United States is engaged in “defensive” actions. But the administration has not furnished any proof that the boats have attacked or had any plans of attacking US targets.

Nor is there any proof that the boats are actually engaged in drug trafficking. But even if the administration could prove that narco-traffickers are piloting the ships, it would mean that the cases should be subject to law enforcement. Instead, the Trump administration has engaged in extrajudicial murder.

The United States has also positioned sufficient firepower in the region to pursue regime change in Venezuela. Although Trump has said that war with the country is unlikely, he has nevertheless ratcheted up the pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by conducting naval attacks near his border, authorizing CIA action inside the country, and considering a plan to seize the country’s oil fields.

Potential wars in Mexico and Venezuela are only the most recent reasons why Trump should be awarded a Nobel War Prize.

For instance, Trump piggybacked on Israel’s attacks against Iran by bombing three nuclear sites in the country. If the president hadn’t destroyed the nuclear agreement with Iran at the start of his first term, there would have been no need for either Israel or the United States to use force against the country’s nuclear program.

Trump has also dispatched the army to American cities, an unprecedented move that has sharpened divisions in US society. He has threatened to use military force against protest movements domestically, even to deport US citizens to prisons overseas.

Trump recently announced that the United States will resume testing of nuclear weapons, in direct violation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which the United States signed but did not ratify). His Energy Department insists that the United States will only test the non-nuclear components of the weapons—such as the delivery systems—but Trump wants the return of underground tests to match what he alleges are similar tests by Russia and China.

One last reason why Donald Trump deserves a Nobel War Prize is his determination to increase the budget of what he now calls the War Department. In May, the president presented the first trillion-dollar defense budget: almost $900 billion in spending plus almost $120 billion in supplemental spending from the reconciliation bill.

A trillion dollars to conduct wars and prepare for wars. Much of that money is for the big-ticket items in the Pentagon arsenal that are designed to fight a war with China.

The Biden administration was not exactly peaceful, though it did withdraw troops from Afghanistan and refuse to send troops to Ukraine (or even establish a no-fly zone over the country).

Today, the Trump administration has restored military action as a top option in US foreign policy. Trump deserves an award for this transformation. But it’s not the prize he thinks he should be given.