Trump nominated for Nobel Peace Prize by Norwegian official, citing Israel-UAE peace deal
President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing at the White House August 13, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Just weeks after helping to broker peace between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), President Trump has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.
The nomination submitted by Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of the Norwegian Parliament, lauded Trump for his efforts toward resolving protracted conflicts worldwide.
“For his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees,” Tybring-Gjedde, a four-term member of Parliament who also serves as chairman of the Norwegian delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, told Fox News in an exclusive interview.
Tybring-Gjedde, in his nomination letter to the Nobel Committee, said the Trump administration has played a key role in the establishment of relations between Israel and the UAE. “As it is expected other Middle Eastern countries will follow in the footsteps of the UAE, this agreement could be a game changer that will turn the Middle East into a region of cooperation and prosperity,” he wrote.
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Also cited in the letter was the president’s “key role in facilitating contact between conflicting parties and … creating new dynamics in other protracted conflicts, such as the Kashmir border dispute between India and Pakistan, and the conflict between North and South Korea, as well as dealing with the nuclear capabilities of North Korea.”
Tybring-Gjedde, further, praised Trump for withdrawing a large number of troops from the Middle East. “Indeed, Trump has broken a 39-year-old streak of American Presidents either starting a war or bringing the United States into an international armed conflict. The last president to avoid doing so was Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter,” he wrote.
This is not Trump’s first such nomination, as Tybring-Gjedde submitted one along with another Norwegian official in 2018 following the U.S. president’s Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un. Japan’s prime minister reportedly did the same. Trump did not win.
Tybring-Gjedde, a member of a conservative-leaning populist party in Norway, told Fox News that his latest nomination is not about trying to curry favor with the U.S. president.
“I’m not a big Trump supporter,” he said. “The committee should look at the facts and judge him on the facts – not on the way he behaves sometimes. The people who have received the Peace Prize in recent years have done much less than Donald Trump. For example, Barack Obama did nothing.”
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The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to then-President Barack Obama for what the Nobel Committee called his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."
That decision made just nine months into Obama’s first term was met with criticism in the U.S. – including from Donald Trump, then a private citizen. Lech Walesa, Poland’s former president and a 1983 Nobel laureate, also said at the time it was too early to bestow the award on Obama -- just 263 days after taking office: “Too fast. For the time being Obama’s just making proposals. But sometimes the Nobel Committee awards the prize to encourage responsible action.”
Even Obama was taken aback, saying at the time he was “surprised and humbled” by the Nobel Committee’s decision. “To be honest,” he said, “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize, men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.”
Besides Obama, three other U.S. presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize: President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 for “having negotiated peace in the Russo-Japanese war”; President Woodrow Wilson in 1920 for being the “leading architect of the League of Nations”; and President Jimmy Carter in 2002 for “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts.”
The Nobel Peace Prize recipient is determined by a five-person Nobel Committee, which is appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. The winner of the Peace Prize for 2021 will not be announced until October of next year.
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