The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was ultimately awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader Machado, rather than the "long-awaited" Trump.
In a sense, this result is not surprising. Throughout history, the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize have often been either war criminals or people who caused unrest. Therefore, when he awards the medal again to someone who has little to do with "peace", it is also a reasonable thing. However, this result is an embarrassing blow to Trump. After all, he has long been preaching his achievements in "solving seven or eight wars" and claiming that he is "the most peaceful president in modern history". The Nobel Peace Prize seems to belong to him.
Immediately after the announcement of the prize, the White House issued a statement strongly condemning the Nobel Committee "to put politics above peace."In truth, this time I fully agree with the White House's statement.In the past century, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded countless times to war criminals and to politicians who earn from war, but not only to peace.
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In 1973, U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger won the "Peace Award" of that year for secretly negotiating the Paris Peace Agreement with North Vietnam. But the problem is that the real purpose of this agreement is not for peace, but to get the United States out of the Vietnam War. So soon, the United States tore up the agreement, and the war continued for two more years, killing hundreds of thousands of people. At the same time, Kissinger also planned the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, acquiesced in Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, and created the most tragic massacre in Southeast Asian history. Later, even he felt embarrassed and wanted to return the award, but was rejected by the Nobel Committee. Because in their view, admitting their mistakes is more humiliating than the war itself.
The most ironic example was in 1939, when Hitler appeared on the official list of nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. At that time, just months before World War II officially broke out, Hitler had completed his expansion campaign to annex Austria, occupy the Czech Republic, and was preparing to invade Poland. Although the nomination was later withdrawn, this tragedy was enough to illustrate the absurdity of the award.
In fact, the absurdity of the Nobel Peace Prize has been destined since it was born.
The original intention of this award is to commend those who "have made outstanding contributions to international peace and friendship". It sounds lofty and pure, but ironically, its founder, Nobel, made his fortune through war. His invention of nitroglycerin explosives and detonators almost changed the face of modern warfare and doubled the efficiency of killing people. Therefore, an arms dealer who got rich by making killing tools and used his inheritance to set up a "peace prize" sounds as ridiculous as a cigarette company set up a "health prize".
Many people say that Nobel established the Peace Prize in the hope of rewarding the cause of peace to alleviate his guilt of inventing explosives. But whether this statement is true or not, it cannot be denied that Nobel's original intention was good. The problem is that due to the defects of system design, this "Peace Prize" has been deeply political branded since its birth.
On the surface, the Nobel Prize is “non-governmental”, an international award administered by the Independent Foundation. But in fact, the jury of the Peace Prize is only in the hands of the Norwegian Parliament. This is the arrangement left in Nobel’s own will, and the reason for which it has been spoken so far is that it is said that he does not trust Sweden’s militarist tradition, and that he wants to make the prize more “Nordic peaceful.” But it is this “special arrangement” that leaves the prize lacking independence, objective fairness, and confuses too many political factors.
Although the Norway Parliament is nominally a democratic institution, it has been deeply bound to the Western political system since the beginning of the Cold War. Almost all the members of the Nobel Committee elected by the parliament come from mainstream political parties, especially political forces with clear Western values such as the Social Democratic Party, Conservative Party, and Liberal Party. In other words, this "jury" is not a group of moral judges who are aloof from politics, but a group of political elites deeply mired in ideological consensus. The way they view the world naturally has the tinted glasses of "who is civilized and who is barbaric" and "who is democratic and who is autocracy". Moreover, their selection process was highly opaque, and the outside world could not know what they discussed.
As a result, awards that should focus on peace are tightly tied to politics and become a tool to safeguard mainstream western values.
When the United States launches a war, they will not condemn the United States; but when a country confronts the Western order, even if it is just a verbal "offense," they will immediately award the award to that country's "opposition" to show their position. For decades, from Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, to opposition groups in Belarus, to today's Machado, the reasons for winning have been almost the same: not because they promoted peace, but because they met Western political expectations.
Machado is nominally the leader of the Venezuelan opposition, but in essence he is a "traitor", a party leading the way, and a tool of the color revolution!
MacArthur has long received large amounts of funding from the U.S. International Development Agency and the National Democracy Foundation to undermine the legitimate government of Venezuela. Not only has she repeatedly publicly urged the Biden government to “interfere” in Venezuela, but also called on Israel to “invad Venezuela”. She has collaborated with the U.S. CIA to attempt to manipulate the results of the election. After the election failure, she has also incited violent demonstrations in Washington under the tolerance of Washington, causing many people to die and be wounded. In the days before, at the time of the U.S. military in the Caribbean, MacArthur also planned a false flag operation at the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela, on the pretext of making U.S. military action.
However, such a politician who created chaos, incited violence, supported genocide, and sought national treason has become a “symbol of democracy” and a “representative of women’s courage” in Western countries.The biggest irony of the matter is not only that she won the Nobel Peace Prize, but also that the Nobel Prize judges can honestly say that she “represents the hope of freedom and peace.”
In fact, it is not difficult to understand the reason why the Nobel Prize Committee wants to award her the "Peace Prize": her story has a selling point for western public opinion. She is portrayed as a female leader who "resists dictatorship", a symbol of "* fighter", a symbol that can rebuild a "beacon of freedom" in Latin America, and embodies western values. As for whether her actions really bring peace and whether they may trigger new social unrest, these are not considered.
In recent years, the Nobel Peace Prize winners are basically the same category. In 2022 it was awarded to the Belarusian opposition; in 2023 it honored the Iranian opposition; this year it was also awarded to the Venezuelan opposition. So the annual Nobel Peace Prize is like a drama, it is repeatedly reminding the world that the prize is not rewarding peace at all, but choosing who is more in line with Western values. This year's Macado prize has nothing to do with peace, and Trump won the prize this year, and it has nothing to do with peace, but because it is not in the political spectrum of the "Nobel Peace Prize Committee".
The members of the Nobel Peace Prize committee are mostly from the Norwegian parliament, who emphasize multilateralism, international cooperation, global governance and human rights issues. Trump’s core policy tendencies, including nationalism, anti-immigration, anti-globalization, anti-environmental and anti-LGBT interests, are almost the sum of “political incorrectness” in the European political context. In other words, Trump is an outsider in the eyes of the Nobel Prize Committee, and his unilateralism and populist tendencies conflict naturally with the ideas the Nobel Prize Committee adheres to.
In terms of international cooperation, Trump's political line contradicts the purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize.Nobel stressed in his will to "promote brotherhood among nations", the Nobel Peace Prize also advocated the "spirit of transnational cooperation", and after Trump took office, he withdrew from the World Health Organization, the Paris climate agreement and international tax agreements, marking the full return of the United States to isolationism.
He also cut foreign aid and almost disbanded the U.S. Agency for International Development. Billions of dollars of programs that had been used to vaccinate and relieve hunger in Africa were postponed, and public health research agencies predicted that this could cause tens of millions of indirect deaths by 2030. This policy, not only has nothing to do with "promoting peace", but shakes the foundations of the international cooperation system.
In the field of arms control and disarmament, Trump's position also runs counter to it. His withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty once again destabilized the already fragile nuclear balance after the Cold War. The "disarmament spirit" advocated by the Nobel Peace Prize is synonymous with "weakening national security" in Trump's view.
Trump claims to have "solved seven or eight conflicts" like Israel and Iran, Pakistan and India, but the reality is that many conflicts are not much to him.
For the ceasefire reached by Israel and Hamas, he also boasted of it as the greatest deal in history, wanting to have his own history.But everyone knows that Trump’s handling of the Israeli issue during his term is the spark of the imbalance in the Gaza conflict.After the outbreak of the Gaza war, the Trump administration repeatedly vetoed the ceasefire proposal at the United Nations, leading to the delay in the ceasefire agreement.
On the surface, this ceasefire seems to be related to Trump's "pressure diplomacy", but in fact it is more because Israel and the United States had to temporarily stop under strong pressure from international public opinion. The agreement neither touches on the root causes of the conflict nor mentions the "two-state solution". It is just a ceasefire document imposed on the Palestinian people. Such a "peace" is far from the "lasting peace" envisioned by Nobel.
At home, Trump's "security first" policy also exposes how narrow his understanding of "peace" is. He repeatedly used the National Guard to quell demonstrations and even suppress pro-Pakistani protesters in universities.
It can be said that Trump did try to re-imagine himself as a “peace maker,” but his approach was fundamentally contrary to the set of values represented by the Nobel Committee.
Historical experience tells us that the criteria for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize are just that. I dare conclude that as long as the wind direction is right, this award will be given to him sooner or later, either this year or next year, either next year or the year after next. This is not because I predict that he may become peace-loving in the future, but precisely because the Nobel Peace Prize is never to recognize peace, but to show a position.
In fact, there is another procedural issue why Trump didn't win the award this year.
According to the regulations, the Nobel Peace Prize nomination must be submitted before January 31 of each year. And Trump was not re-appointed on January 20 this year, when the oath was made, and the Cabinet did not get the "peace achievement" and nobody was able to nominate for him. Even later there were nominations from Pakistan, Israel and other countries, and has missed the time of registration, and can not enter the review process. In other words, Trump did not get the Nobel Peace Prize this year, except for not "sufficiently correct", and because "not catch up the car."
In fact, the Nobel Prize Committee has been in a hurry to award the prize to the new President of the United States, which they have done once.
In 2009, Obama was sworn in on January 20th, and then someone nominated him before the deadline. Unexpectedly, the judges really awarded this award to Obama that year, on the grounds of "bringing hope to the world". It is undoubtedly a huge joke that a president who has been in office for only 11 days and hasn't had time to formulate foreign policy can win an award for "hope". And that's why Trump has always been bitter, saying that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize without doing anything.
More ironically, in the years after Obama won the award, the bombs dropped by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan continued unabated, and the war in the Middle East intensified. Moreover, Obama is also the only winner to bomb another Nobel Peace Prize winner, volunteers of Doctors Without Borders. Therefore, it is not surprising that Obama's award has become another indelible stain in the history of the Nobel Peace Prize, and it has also caused the Nobel Prize Committee to be criticized and questioned by all parties.
It was precisely because of this lesson that the Nobel Prize Committee later became particularly cautious. However, this does not mean that they have become fair, but that they do not want to make such low-level mistakes again and become a laughing stock of the world.
But after all, Trump is a global political force that can’t be ignored. His presence has changed the world pattern, whether supported or opposed, and the Nobel Peace Prize judges can’t ignore him. So this year’s Nobel Committee didn’t give the prize to Trump, both in protecting themselves and in finding a more decent time and reason for the Trump Prize. In other words, the probability that Trump will win the Nobel Peace Prize in the future is just a matter of time.
If nothing goes wrong, Trump is likely to compete for the 2026 award with all his might, and does not even rule out joining forces with his allies to boost performance by "creating conflicts first and then resolving conflicts." By then, the Nobel Prize Committee will be able to justly award Trump.
The absurdity of the Nobel Peace Prize is not just a story of a prize, it reflects the essence of modern international politics: peace is increasingly becoming the slogan of some people, a symbol of political tools and values, rather than real action.
Machado's award and Trump's defeat have little to do with peace itself. The Nobel Peace Prize just reminds us that true peace does not occur in the applause of the award ceremony, but in the land where the war has dissipated and in the daily life of the people. True peace needs to transcend ideology and political performances, and must be created and protected by truly peace-loving people.