Editorial: From Nobel to IgNobel

Donald Trump’s second advent has reduced the foreign policy of nations to just one thing: Just flatter him. The best practitioners of this policy have been the leaders of Israel and Pakistan. They went to the White House with letters nominating the American President for the Nobel Peace Prize and came away with effusive gratitude.

There’s irony in these recommendations. Which other countries could have worse credentials than Pakistan and Israel to recommend a nominee for the peace prize? One with a record of aiding cross-border terror, and the other busy annihilating an enclave after bombing three countries and assassinating a bunch of leaders. And how apt that this duo would recommend a leader who just dropped a dozen bunker busters upon a country 10,000 km from his own and supplies arms to a war in Europe and a genocide in Gaza?

It's tempting to lament that the Nobel Peace Prize has come to this pass. Once upon a time, it was a prize hard to earn; you had to end a war, unite warring nations or assist a country to democracy. Only titans won it, like Nelson Mandela, Norman Borlaug or Martin Luther King, or humanitarian organisations like the World Food Programme or the Red Cross. However, the Nobel’s reputation has become chequered in the past half century due to some questionable calls and playing to the gallery.

A common thread running through this decline is the tendency to give the peace award to warmongers. In 1973, it went to Henry Kissinger­­ and Le Duc Tho for apparently ending the Vietnam War. The American war hawk accepted the honour and continued to bomb Laos and Cambodia, while the Vietnamese leader had the good judgement to refuse it because the war had not yet ended.

Three Israeli Prime Ministers ­— Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres — have won the award since 1978 despite their country’s ceaseless bellicosity towards its neighbours, displacing its own people, occupying Arab areas and practising apartheid. More recently, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won the prize in 2019 for supposedly ending a long-standing conflict with Eritrea, but within a year, he launched a military offensive in Tigray that resulted in mass civilian casualties and displacement.

Apart from this fatal attraction for warmongers, the peace Nobel has tended to be susceptible to charm and sentiment. Remember Barack Obama’s win in 2009, nine months into office? The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave the prize to him for being a nice-looking Black senator who could tell a good basketball joke. The same guy who later oversaw operations in seven conflict zones. Even he gave a ‘what, me Nobel?’ look when the tidings came from Oslo.

Similarly, Aung San Suu Kyi won the prize in 1991 more for what she promised than for what she delivered. She later ascended to power in Myanmar and looked on while a pogrom was launched against minorities in her country. Then there was Malala Yousafzai, a teenager who stood up to the Taliban and became a global icon. Her peace prize at 17 was a Nobel for promise, not peace.

So, if Kissinger, why not Donald Trump? Why not indeed? That would complete the circle, finally reducing the Nobel to the IgNobel.