The Atlantic magazine has published more anti-President Donald Trump content, this time an author at the left-wing publication wrote the Nobel Peace Prize should be eliminated because Trump’s nomination has tarnished the award.
“The Atlantic magazine has been slammed after sharing an op-ed that the Nobel Peace Prize should be ‘ended’ after President Donald Trump was nominated in the wake of diplomatic breakthroughs between Israel and Gulf Arab countries,” the UK Daily Mail reported.
The eyebrow-raising article by Graeme Wood comes just a week after the same publication alleged the president “disparaged fallen and wounded American soldiers during a trip to France in 2018.”
The latter narrative about Trump and the military has been debunked, including through remarks from author Jeffrey Goldberg, who has walked back his reporting, which was based entirely on anonymous sources.
Wood’s stunning opinion piece pulls no punches in its utter disdain for a sitting president of the United States:
If Trump wins the prize, it will be the fourth Nobel awarded for peace between Israel and its neighbors. (The announcement will come on October 9.) That will make Arab-Israeli peace mediators more successful at charming the Nobel Committee than the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has won three times in the prize’s 120-year history, but still less successful than my favorite, which is no one at all. The committee has declined to award a peace prize 19 times, most recently in 1972. (The next year, in a decision so trollish it might have come out of the Prose Edda, they awarded the prize to Henry Kissinger.) Giving the peace prize to no one at all is a tradition the Nobel Committee should revive, perhaps on a permanent basis. The record of achievement of the peace laureates is so spotty, and the rationales for their awards so eclectic, that the committee should take a long break to consider whether peace is a category coherent enough to be worth recognizing. Peace had its chance, and blew it. The Trump nomination—one of hundreds, including this second from a Swede—helps show why.
In my view the deal between the Emirates and Israel is good for the region, but a deal between Israel and the absolute monarchs of a small Gulf state is not a deal between Israel and the people of the Emirates, let alone between Israelis and Palestinians. Trump’s main diplomatic maneuver is to adopt a lickspittle posture toward authoritarians, promising them decades in power in return for a smile and a condo development. Peace does not mean a web of personal agreements between rich psychopaths.
By now the contradictions of the peace prize should be apparent. Is it given for peace, or for rumors of peace? Do you deserve a prize for maintaining despots, as long as the despots are part of a stable network? Is it given for accidentally wrecking a great military—or only if the destruction is intentional? What if you do all the right things, but you are a boor, or an alleged rapist? To these questions one might add a counsel of humility: If you have given the prize to enablers of genocide, kleptocrats, serial fabricators, and AIDS conspiracists, maybe you should sit out the next few rounds.
Wood did include remarks from Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a Norwegian parliamentarian, one of two people who nominated Trump, who explained his reasoning in interviews.
“Other politicians don’t pick up the phone to talk,” Tybring-Gjedde said, adding that one of the criteria winners should meet is “peace congresses. “He has the ability to be down-to-earth and talk to people at all levels.”
“Isn’t it strange,” Tybring-Gjedde asked, “that in school you learn that to talk to people is the best thing? And now we are told talking to the wrong people is a bad thing,” Tybring-Gjedde said. “Maybe [if you talk] you will notice that [the other guy] is not as bad as you think.”
“Look at the Oslo Accords,” Tybring-Gjedde said. “Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin won jointly in 1994 for a peace process begun at meetings a short walk from where we were speaking—and then fell apart completely a few years later. “How many months of secret back-and-forth were there, and they ended up with no peace. They got the peace prize!”
Tybring-Gjedde also praised Trump for not starting wars and by bringing U.S. troops home from endless conflicts around the world.
Meanwhile, Wood describes Trump’s successful foreign policy as “brief conversations with hideous men are a reason to award the prize, and its history suggests that he might be right.”
The U.K. Daily Mail reported on reaction on social media, including one that pointed out that Wood and Goldberg are “so bitter” beyond reason about Trump’s nomination:
Another Twitter user wrote: “This is from serial liar Jeff Goldberg endorsing a wackadoo column by deranged Atlantic scribe Graeme Wood decrying POTUS’s double Nobel nominations. All shows Atlantic to be a faaaaaar left organ.
“They gave it to Arafat and Obama. Neither of which did anything to earn it,” another Twitter user commented.
“Trump helps to negotiate historical peace agreements nobody thought possible, so we need to end the Nobel Peace Prize…” tweeted another.
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