The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced today morning that Donald J Trump has not been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, thereby dodging what would have been the capstone achievement in the prize's dotted legacy of blunders. Norway had been bracing for this moment, facing increasing pressure from Trump and his administration to award it to the US President. Somewhere in Oslo, you can hear the collective sigh of committee members who spent the last few weeks contemplating whether avoiding Trump's wrath was worth compromising the integrity of the institution. It has occasionally let this up for question, but surely a Trump award would have been too hilarious to treat as legitimate news.
Norwegian analysts worried about potential retaliation through tariffs, demands for higher NATO contributions, or possibly being classified an enemy. To pacify a man who's made his office a tool of personal vengeance is no easy task. And the specter of diplomatic consequences hung over the committee's decision like a storm cloud at a garden party. Trump kept pushing his own case aggressively through public declarations that he deserved it and called Norwegian officials, all while his son Eric took to social media asking followers to retweet if they believed his father deserved the prize. Nothing quite beats a Twitter/X campaign in shouting "achievement."
In response to the lost Nobel, the White House spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote on X, "President Trump will continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives. He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will." Things like this really serve as reminders that the White House was indeed expecting a reward for all the nothing-deals Trump claimed to chair and execute with exemplary success. The White House added, "The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace." There is no end to this clownery, at least not in the recent future.
Enough about the laughable—and truly horrendous—what-could-have-been. This is who the Norwegian Nobel Committee did announce was winner of the Peace Prize 2025: Maria Corina Machado, the founder of Súmate, an organization devoted to democratic development. Machado is currently living in hiding in Venezuela after her presidential candidacy was blocked and election results rejected, represents genuine courage in the face of dictatorship. The committee said it chose her because she meets "all three criteria stated in Alfred Nobel's will: "She has brought her country’s opposition together. She has never wavered in resisting the militarisation of Venezuelan society. She has been steadfast in her support for a peaceful transition to democracy."
But does this mean that the Nobel committee's choice reflects a principled stand? Or, had the American President perhaps been better educated in political etiquette, would he have gotten his way around with diplomatic power? After all, the legacy of the prize, as I mentioned already, is not entirely pristine.
Even Machado's win is not free of taints. In her first reaction on X, the Venezuelan leader—also referred to as the country's 'Iron Lady' for likeness with Margaret Thatcher's politics—dedicated her Nobel to "the suffering people" of her country and to "President Trump for his decisive support for [their] cause." For Trump, it may not be a lost cause after all.
The Nobel awarded to Machado can be perceived as a subtle diplomatic nod to Donald Trump who has been trying to position himself advantageously in the broader geopolitical game around Venezuela. Trump, as the 'champion of democracy', can now further push for direct intervention– both political and military—against Nicolás Maduro. The American President did, most recently, ramp up attacks on boats suspected to be carrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea. With Machado gaining recognition globally now, the US can position her as the 'legitimate' leader to lead the regime in Caracas. Ousting the 'cartel', as Trump & Co. often describe Maduro's government, can become the normative rhetoric now.
This is but one instance in a cloudy range of Nobel Prizes.
In 1973, the committee awarded the prize to Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ for negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam. Lê Đức Thọ, displaying more wisdom than the entire Nobel Committee, refused the prize, noting that peace hadn't actually broken out in Vietnam yet. He was right. The war continued for two more years. Meanwhile, Kissinger accepted his award. But, he did not show up out of fear of being targeted by anti-war protesters. And he continued orchestrating the secret bombing of Cambodia which ultimately killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and destabilised the entire region for decades. Tom Lehrer, the satirist songwriter, famously remarked that the award made political satire obsolete.
In 2009, Barack Obama too received the Nobel Prize for Peace, for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples". All in mere nine months of serving as the American President. Geir Lundestad, who stepped down as secretary of the Nobel committee in 2014, admitted that the award to Obama "didn't achieve what it had hoped for." But Lundestad also portrays it as a case of Obama himself being surprised by the award, because the American President had apparently considered not attending the function at Oslo. He went anyway because he was informed that an awardee's absence occurred only in the rarest of circumstances, when transit was impermissible. An American President not anticipating a prize as grand as the Nobel, as hushed whispers did their rounds, is a hard to believe observation.
If we wind a few more decades back, we'll see another Nobel blunder. In 1949, Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses." That's just euphemism for lobotomy, if you haven't realised that already. This procedure was quite common—and sought after—in the 1940s and 1950s. JFK's sister was one in a long list of patients. But the consequences of the procedure were unsettling. The irreversible brain damage it caused could not be overlooked. Moniz, according to his critics, often downplayed the complications. He chose not to follow up with patients, almost as if he had nothing more to do with what he had done to them.
The Watson-Crick-Wilkins awardee trio in 1962 for Physiology too has not aged well. Their discovery—of the DNA's double-helix structure—was based on Rosalind Franklin's work. Yet, she was kept out of scientific glory's spotlight during her lifetime. To make matters worse, James Watson also made a reputation as an infamous racist, often asserting that Africans are genetically prone to lower intelligence and that policy-making does not factor this in. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where Watson had worked for decades, stripped him of all honorary titles. He had brought enough misfortune with his words that he was forced to sell his Nobel medal to fix his financial troubles. He did reserve part of the money thus received to support other research—very thoughtful of the man who was seeking to "re-enter public life" and try, in vain, to trounce the distasteful legacy his words had left.
From Oslo to Stockholm to the world, the lesson is quite simple. Awards mean nothing if the deeds don't follow, if the science causes harm, and if the awardees do not know how to use their platform wisely.
