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Donald Trump Deserves the Nobel Prize for War
From Iran to Venezuela, the Trump administration has restored military action as a top option in US foreign policy.
Nov 15, 2025
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.
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From Executive Overreach to Undeclared Wars, We Are Living in the World Cheney Made
Dick Cheney midwifed the emergence of a new warfare marked by extrajudicial killing, torture, secrecy, and endless war that transformed American society and politics, perhaps forever.
Nov 04, 2025
Dick Cheney has died, according to reports Tuesday morning, at the age of 84.
A formidable White House and defense department aide (under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford) who left to head an equally formidable Texas-based oil company (with vast federal contracts) and then back in Washington as vice president to George W. Bush, Cheney is probably the most symbolic figure of the failure of the post-9/11 wars. In particular, the Iraq War. It was his amassed power and special cadre of operators known as neoconservatives inside the Old Executive Office building and E Ring at the Pentagon, who with strategic treachery dominated the politics and intelligence necessary to march Washington into the invasion of 2003 and to proliferate a Global War on Terror that lasted well beyond his tenure in office.
By all accounts it was his midwifed lies over WMDs that got us there, followed by the blunders (not anticipating the Iraqi insurgency); the loss of life (millions); the cost to our treasury; and the emergence of a new warfare marked by extrajudicial killing, torture, secrecy, and endless war that transformed American society and politics, perhaps forever.
For it was the exploitation of American grief, fear, and patriotism after 9/11 to pursue neoconservative wars in the Middle East that zapped the people's faith in government institutions. It pretty much destroyed the Republican Party and gave rise to populist movements on both sides of the aisle. It created a generation of veterans harboring more mistrust in elites and Washington than even the Vietnam War era. On the other end of the spectrum, it unleashed mercenary warfare, killer drones, civil wars, and police powers in the United States that have only served make the people less free and more fearful of their government. Thanks in part to Dick Cheney, the Executive, i.e. the president, has more power than ever—to bomb, detain, and "decapitate" any government leader he does not like.
There will be many obituaries written for Dick Cheney, all will be scarred with his role in the Iraq War. For a time he was a very, very powerful man and then he went away to retire and help raise his grandchildren. How many hundreds of thousands of American families were unable to do the same, plagued by death, disease, mental injuries, sterility, divorce, addiction, suicide—because of a war that he so relentlessly pushed but should never have been.
Cheney's Quest for More Executive Power and 'Machtpolitik'
Cheney first came to national prominence when he served as White House chief of staff (1975-77) to President Gerald Ford. In that position, he worked closely with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to counter and eventually derail Henry Kissinger's strategy of "detente" with the Soviet Union.
In that initiative, Cheney and Rumsfeld also worked closely with the Washington-based leaders of the emergent neoconservative movement, a number of them, including Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams, working in the office of Washington State Democratic Senator and Senate Armed Services Chairman Henry "Scoop" Jackson, to promote, among other things, Jewish emigration to Israel and in persuading Ford to convene an ultra-hawkish "Team B" outside the intelligence community to hype the alleged military threat posed by Moscow.
Their mutual interest in pursuing a massive US arms buildup and an aggressive foreign policy more generally would form the basis of an alliance between the aggressive nationalism and Machtpolitik of Cheney and Rumsfeld on the one hand, and the Israel-centered neoconservatives on the other that created the infamous Project for the New American Century in 1998 and ultimately became dominant in the post-9/11 "global war on terror" (GWOT) and the Iraq invasion for which he always remained unrepentant.
In the 1980s, Cheney, who chafed at the post-Watergate restrictions on presidential power, particularly regarding foreign policy, served as Wyoming’s single congressman in the House of Representatives where he became a staunch and powerful defender both of Ronald Reagan’s anti-Soviet policies and of the “Reagan Doctrine” of rolling back leftist regimes and movements in the Global South, notably in Central America and southern Africa. A staunch defender of the protagonists of what became the Iran-Contra scandal, a secret operation to sell weapons to Iran and use the proceeds to fund the Nicaraguan contras (for whom Congress had prohibited any US assistance), he later prevailed on President George H.W. Bush, for whom he served as defense secretary, to issue pardons to those, like Abrams, convicted as a result of the affair.
In the wake of the first Gulf War, Cheney commissioned his undersecretary of defense for policy, Paul Wolfowitz, to draft a long-term US strategy, called the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), whose global ambitions, when leaked to the Washington Post, provoked a flurry of controversy about the future US role in the world.
Among other things, the draft called for Washington to maintain permanent military dominance of virtually all of Eurasia to be achieved by “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role” and by preempting, using whatever means necessary, states believed to be developing weapons of mass destruction. It foretold a world in which US military intervention would become a “constant fixture” of the geopolitical landscape, and Washington would act as the ultimate guarantor of international peace and security.
One of the document’s principal drafters was I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who would later become Vice President Cheney’s highly effective chief of staff and national security adviser during George W. Bush’s first term until he was indicted for perjury.
The draft DPG would essentially become the template for what became in 1997 the Project for New American Century, a letterhead organization launched by neoconservatives Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan that in some ways formalized the coalition of Machtpolitikers like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and John Bolton; pro-Israel neoconservatives like Perle, Abrams, Libby, Eliot Cohen, and Frank Gaffney; and Christian Zionists, such as Gary Bauer and William Bennett.
PNAC subsequently published a series of hawkish statements and open letters demanding substantial increases in the US defense budget and stronger US action against perceived adversaries, notably Iraq, Iran, and China. Led by Cheney as vice president and Rumsfeld as defense secretary, many PNAC associates, particularly neoconservatives, took key posts in the George W. Bush administration in 2001, while PNAC became the leading group outside the administration banging the drum for invading Iraq and prosecuting the “global war on terror.” A legacy that leads directly to the current moment where Cheney's hard won Executive powers rule over a landscape of unauthorized US military interventions and undeclared wars all over the globe.
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Stephen Miller, Who Once Reportedly Called to Drone-Strike Migrants, Is Leading Trump's Attacks on Venezuelan Boats
"For all intents and purposes, the most powerful person in the federal government is Stephen Miller," said one legal scholar.
Sep 29, 2025
The deputy chief of staff to President Donald Trump, Stephen Miller—who once reportedly advocated for the US to launch drone strikes against unarmed migrants—has played a leading role in the US’s campaign of extrajudicial airstrikes on Venezuelan boats in recent weeks.
As The Guardian reported Monday, Miller has been heavily involved in directing the strikes, at times superseding the role of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. These strikes have been orchestrated by the Homeland Security Council (HSC), which Miller leads as the president's homeland security adviser.
In a notable departure from previous administrations, Miller has turned HSC into an autonomous entity within the second Trump administration. During previous administrations, the HSC operated under the national security council umbrella and reported to the US national security adviser, who is also currently Rubio.
In recent weeks, Trump has carried out attacks on three boats in the Caribbean that the administration has alleged were carrying drugs. Legal experts from across the spectrum have contended that even if this were the case, such strikes—which have killed at least 17 people in total—are patently illegal.
The administration has provided no evidence to indicate that the people on these boats were smuggling drugs to the US. Meanwhile, one former senior law enforcement official with years of experience fighting cartels told the New York Times that the first boat struck in September—which killed 11 people—was more likely carrying migrants, since it is unusual for a drug smuggling operation to require so many people on board.
On Friday, it was reported that the US military was considering launching more strikes inside Venezuelan territory against alleged members and leaders of drug trafficking groups, as well as drug laboratories. Many commentators have said that such strikes would be an act of war and a potential prelude to a regime change operation.
That Miller is a driving force behind the boat attacks squares with previous reporting that, in 2018, while serving as one of Trump's top immigration advisers, Miller had allegedly advocated for the president to launch predator drones to blow up boats carrying unarmed migrants.
Those comments appeared in a book written by former Trump Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor, who said that Miller argued for the mass killing of civilians by suggesting that they were not protected under the US Constitution because they were in international waters. After it was initially reported by Rolling Stone in 2023, Miller denied having made the comment.
As The Guardian notes, "Miller’s role also opens a window into the dubious legal justification that has been advanced for the strikes." This rationale is centered around the Trump administration's designation of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a "terrorist" organization, which Miller has also used to justify the unlawful deportation of Venezuelans under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.
Miller has portrayed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as the leader of the organization, suggesting—again with little evidence—that “it is not a government, it is a drug cartel, a narco-trafficking organization that is running Venezuela.”
As Common Dreams reported in May, a declassified memo showed that US intelligence agencies have rejected the Trump administration's claim that Tren de Aragua works with Maduro.
Miller's central role in the strikes carried out this past month is another sign of an outsized and growing role in the second Trump White House.
He has been a primary architect of Trump's "mass deportation" crusade, which has also involved carrying out extrajudicial deportations of Venezuelan nationals accused of membership in Tren de Aragua, often with little to no evidence.
In June, following a directive from Miller to reach a "quota" of 3,000 immigration arrests per day, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has overwhelmingly targeted undocumented immigrants without criminal convictions.
Miller is also leading the White House's efforts to label left-wing organizations in the US as "terrorist organizations" in the aftermath of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk as part of efforts to "dismantle" the president's opposition.
Following the news of Miller's intimate involvement in the Venezuelan boat strikes, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick commented that, "For all intents and purposes, the most powerful person in the federal government is Stephen Miller, not Trump."
"He is dictating military strikes, overriding cabinet secretaries, running mass deportation, and more," he said, "all while Trump golfs and occasionally signs executive orders he hasn’t read.”
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