Give Him the Prize!

Theodore Roosevelt, an advocate of ‘big stick diplomacy’, viewed Latin America as the United States’ backyard – a place where it could intervene at will. At the slightest threat to American interests, he would send in the marines – to Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Cuba. In 1903 Washington sponsored a separatist movement in Panama, then a province of Colombia, to secure control of the future canal. Three years later, having been lauded for mediating in the Russo-Japanese war, Roosevelt received the Nobel peace prize.

General George C Marshall was US army chief of staff in the second world war and approved the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When he became secretary of state in 1947, he set about containing Soviet influence. In Italy, he orchestrated one of the first interventions of the cold war: covertly funding the Christian Democrats, disseminating false information, mobilising Italian-American celebrities (Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Rocky Graziano) and the mafia. A month before Italy’s April 1948 election, he publicly warned that if the communists won, the country would be excluded from the European reconstruction programme – the famous Marshall Plan. In 1953 the general too was honoured in Oslo.

Henry Kissinger, national security advisor from 1969 to 1975, was another enthusiast for destabilisation. ‘I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,’ he said of Chile in June 1970, where the socialist leader Salvador Allende looked set to win the presidency. When Allende was indeed elected, Kissinger saw only one solution: a military coup, ‘but through Chilean sources and with a low posture’. Allende was overthrown in September 1973 and replaced by a bloody dictatorship. Kissinger won the Nobel peace prize a month later for signing a ceasefire with Vietnam after having set all Indochina ablaze.

Barack Obama had merely lent tepid support to a coup against Honduran president Manuel Zelaya when he too received the honour in October 2009, shortly after arriving in the White House. But he soon gave his predecessors a run for their money, bombing Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, and expanding a programme of extrajudicial executions – often based on mere suspicion and far from any declared theatre of war – in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.

Donald Trump did therefore have legitimate hopes of receiving the 2025 prize. He too has deployed troops in the Caribbean. He too has practised blackmail via US aid, threatening to choke Argentina financially if Javier Milei lost the election. He too makes free use of (increasingly less) targeted assassinations in the name of combatting terrorism – as when he justified the killing at sea of Venezuelan citizens, whom he accused without evidence of drug trafficking. And he too plans coups against recalcitrant governments, as in Venezuela, where he authorised the CIA to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro.

But it wasn’t enough. The Norwegian committee instead picked María Corina Machado, a far-right Venezuelan opposition figure who has for 25 years called for foreign intervention against her own country, and who, soon after the Nobel announcement, congratulated Binyamin Netanyahu for his actions in Gaza. Trump quelled his disappointment by launching a fresh crusade – this time against Colombia. He’s burnishing his CV for the 2026 prize.

For 50 years, the Nobel committee has rejected the candidacies of dissidents from the Western world. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have worked for peace in a different way from Machado. But they possess one unforgivable flaw: they expose our own dirty secrets.

Translated by George Miller.

This first appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique.

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