Opinion...

President Trump, say goodbye to your dream of winning the Nobel Peace Prize


October 25, 2025

Middle East Monitor

US President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media aboard Air Force One on October 24, 2025, in flight. [Andrew Harnik/Getty Images]

by Jasim Al-Azzawi

Donald Trump’s self-congratulatory claim that he “ended nine major wars” is a refrain of his post-presidential mythmaking. He speaks of peace like a stage magician speaks of miracles — with flourish, confidence, and an eye to applause. He boasts that he “ended eight wars” and that his deals are monuments of diplomacy. The Nobel Committee, he implies, should be grateful for the spectacle. This is not humility. It is hubris.

But as the Gaza truce — the crown jewel of his latest diplomatic initiative — disintegrates amid renewed Israeli airstrikes and contentious politics, the illusion of peace is devolving into the same familiar Middle Eastern quagmire. With it, Trump’s long-coveted Nobel Peace Prize nomination is at risk of turning into a joke.

There is a dark humor to the conjugal politics of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Two mythmakers and dealers in theatrical certainty have entered into a convenience marriage: Trump brings the stagecraft, Netanyahu brings the violence, dressed up as national security. They each need the other to exist politically. Trump needs the trophy of “peace” to burnish a contested legacy; Netanyahu needs the American umbrella to camouflage a fracturing coalition and his own fading credibility at home. When the ceasefire breaks down, they will accuse each other of betrayal — and those crushed by their egos will pay the cost.

The Trump-brokered peace, announced with fanfare and promoted as a historic breakthrough, has proven to be nothing of the sort. “The ceasefire was never real,” veteran State Department Middle East peace adviser Aaron David Miller told interviewers. “It was a political show for domestic optics, not regional stability.” Former US ambassador Daniel Kurtzer described such plans as “built for headlines, not for lasting compromise.” These are not partisan complaints. They are admonitions from veterans who spent decades trying to translate the region’s contradictions into workable institutions. Peace requires more than a tweet; it requires timelines, verification, incentives, and credible third-party guarantees.

Netanyahu’s history as an unreliable partner gives these warnings teeth. Israeli opposition leaders — current coalition critics and former prime ministers — have not hesitated to brand him a liar and to accuse him of sabotaging peace for political gain. Daniel Levy, director of the US/Middle East Project, encapsulates the instinct of many analysts: “Netanyahu views diplomacy as a tactical move. He signs agreements to buy time or deflect pressure, not to implement them.” Sarah Leah Whitson put it differently: “Netanyahu has never honored a single agreement with the Palestinians.”

That history is not merely epigraph; it is practice. Foreign leaders have expressed concern privately about his double-dealing. It was infamously reported that the then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy was overheard telling President Barack Obama, “I cannot stand Netanyahu; he’s a liar,” to which Obama reportedly replied, “You’re tired of him, but I have to work with him every day.” Public frustration has given way to private fatigue. Back home in Israel, critics call his leadership a theater of delay: last-minute demands, strategic ambiguity, and agreements that expire the moment they are made.

When — not if — the ceasefire collapses, the theatrics will be tediously predictable. Trump will tweet about betrayal and bad faith. Netanyahu will invoke Hamas’ intransigence and existential threat. Each will level the accusation that the other betrayed a friend for a secret agenda. Each will spin blame for domestic audiences. One man’s charge of treachery will be another’s excuse for resumed assault.

The ethical and legal stakes are not abstract. Rights organizations, humanitarian organizations, and the United Nations have reported repeated assaults on civilian infrastructure, extreme limits on aid flows, and events giving rise to grave concerns about compliance with the laws of war. Satellite images and survivor accounts accumulate, solidifying into the evidentiary records that haunt states when the world demands accountability. Should mass violence recur, those records will be delivered to prosecutors, fact-finders, and public memory.

And the Nobel Committee will not treat these events as footnotes. The Committee takes intention and outcome into account. It has a record of courting controversy when laurels appear to be premature; it is not blind to the difference between spectacle and substance. A man who would have it honor him for negotiating temporary truces while violence rages on asks the world to mistake photo opportunities for penance.

Apologists will point to the optics: Mr Trump went, he brokered a handshake, and leaders posed for photographs. That is literally true. He recaptured the narrative of peacemaking on camera. But optics don’t substitute for verification. A handshake without inspectors is a seal on a promise that will more than likely be broken. A ceasefire without enforcement is a pause, not a solution. If the pause fails, the same spectacle that seeks to immortalize a legacy will instead expose the hubristic theater that hides human devastation.

When the recriminations come, they will be raw and theatrical. Trump will accuse Netanyahu of ingratitude and duplicity. Netanyahu will accuse Trump of naïveté and of overpromising what was never deliverable. Both will tell the truth and both will lie. The price will be paid in lives.

History demands hard questions. Leaders who traffic in theatrics and will not build durable instruments of peace are not merely fools. They are architects of future misery. The Nobel Committee has never been a publicity office for presidents who hunger for laurels. It honours those whose actions reduce suffering, not those who stage temporary reprieves.

If violence resumes and it becomes clear that the “peace” was a prop, Trump’s claim to the prize and moral legitimacy will evaporate. He may never have deserved the award; he may now deserve the scorn. Netanyahu will be held to the same benchmark: not by orations or photo ops, but by whether the innocent are safer for his intrigues. The verdict of history is slow in coming, but it will come. In the meantime, the rubble bears witness, the refugees remember, and the world watches.

“Perfidy is the currency of Middle Eastern politics,” said former New York Times war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges, as if he had Netanyahu in his crosshairs. “And Trump, for all his bluster, is learning that the region devours illusions.”

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.