Will the Nobel Peace Prize be dishonored by Trump's diplomatic charade?

It's outrageous and revolting: in his speech at the UN on September 23, 2025, Donald Trump, with boundless arrogance, proclaimed that "everyone says" he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for achievements like the Abraham Accords, but that the real prize is saving millions of lives from inglorious wars. The first question is: who is "everyone," paleface?

This blatant self-promotion masks a chaotic diplomacy that sows discord, not harmony, trading genuine peace for cheap spotlights and fleeting illusions.

On October 10, 2025, in Oslo, the Norwegian Nobel Committee will announce the name that, at least in theory, will symbolize humanity's pursuit of peace. The ceremony will take place, as it has for more than three decades, in the contained cold of Oslo City Hall. In the last three years, this stage has hosted causes that transcend borders and memories: in 2024, Nihon Hidankyo, the voice of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki against nuclear horror; in 2023, Narges Mohammadi, an Iranian prisoner who resists for women's rights and against the death penalty; and in 2022, Ales Bialiatski, Memorial and the Center for Civil Liberties, staunch defenders of democracy in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. It is in this same setting, designed to recognize those who patiently and courageously shape the future, that the name of Donald J. Trump begins to resonate—not as a promise of reconciliation, but as a provocation to the very meaning of the prize.

I reflect that there are awards that consecrate. And also awards that, if poorly granted, become monuments to error. The Nobel Peace Prize was created to recognize those who build lasting bridges between peoples. But it can also, if given to the wrong hands, become a seal of prestige for agendas that corrode the very idea of ​​peace.

In 2025, Donald J. Trump emerges as a candidate. The mere possibility is already a test of the integrity of the prize. The Nobel Committee, which has already faced crises of credibility, once again finds itself facing a decision capable of tarnishing not only the present, but also confidence in the future.

Trump didn't build peace; he staged scenarios. He created opportunistic agreements, with waving flags and calculated statements designed to generate headlines, not stability. It's instant diplomacy: negotiations take place in front of the cameras, and as soon as they fade, the fissures reappear.

Since returning to power, his government has been dedicated to weakening the institutions that underpin democracy—a minimum prerequisite for any real pacification. Courts, Congress, and technical bodies have been shaped to serve a logic of political control that turns neutrality into a mere decorative element.

Abroad, he turned trade into a battleground: tariffs as weapons, sanctions as sieges. He broke agreements, shook alliances, and sold the image of a ruthless strategist. When the narrative wasn't enough, he resorted to military improvisation: the impulsive air strike on Iran in 2025 ruined delicate negotiations and generated outrage even from countries that had endorsed his Nobel Prize nomination.

For Trump, peace seems like a marketing slogan. His "historic agreements" often exclude the main players, as if dialogue were a dispensable detail. The result is predictable: conflicts conveniently suspended, waiting for the next trigger.

I recall a phrase written in an old notebook: "Some confuse the silence between two gunshots with the achievement of peace." It is this confusion that sustains his candidacy. Peace is not an interlude; it is a process. It requires persistence, inclusion, and a conscious renunciation of the logic of confrontation.

Awarding him the prize would be tantamount to validating spectacle diplomacy, where theatrics supplant patient negotiation. The Nobel Prize would then come to endorse the ephemeral—as happened in 1973, when Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ received the prize in the midst of the Vietnam War, provoking resignations on the Committee and international discredit.

Today, the risk is the same: moral erosion, protests, and the implicit message that building peace is not as important as pretending that it exists.

Statues, as we know, don't speak. But there are silences that speak volumes. Rejecting Trump is not a partisan gesture; it is reaffirming that the Nobel Prize does not bow to fleeting applause or to leaders who confuse the stage with a negotiating table.

The opposite of this would be to crown division, improvisation, and political theater as virtues, etching an indelible infamy into the history of the prize. May the future, when leafing through the Oslo archives, not encounter the shame of 2025, when peace was reduced to a mere charade, betraying Nobel's legacy and mocking humanity's yearning for true reconciliation.