President Donald Trump has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, just weeks after helping to broker peace between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
He was nominated by Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of the Norwegian Parliament, who praised Trump for his efforts towards resolving 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 said to Fox News.
Tybring-Gjedde, who is a four-term member of Parliament who also serves as chairman of the Norwegian delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, said the Trump administration played a key role in the establishment of relations between The UAE and Israel.
The Norwegian MP said that the President had met the three conditions needed to win the peace prize.
‘The first one is fellowship among nations and he has done that through negotiations,’ he said.
‘Reduction of standing armies – he has reduced the number of troops in the Middle East and the third criteria is promotion of peace congresses,’ he said, adding that Trump had made ‘tremendous efforts’ towards brokering peace.
Four U.S. presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize, which is determined by the five-person Nobel Committee, which is appointed by the Norwegian Parliament.
Barack Obama won in 2009, Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, President Woodrow Wilson in 1920 and President Jimmy Carter in 2002. The 2021 winner will not be announced until October next year.
Like Trump, Tybring-Gjedde is fiercely against immigration, and once compared the hijab to outfits worn by the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
In 2006, he also nominated Islam-critical filmmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali for the Nobel Peace Prize. Hirsi Ali did not win the prize.
Along with another Norwegian official, Tybring-Gjedde nominated Trump for the prize in 2018 after the president’s Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un. Japan’s prime minister Shinzō Abe reportedly did the same, but Trump failed to win.
Speaking to Fox News, the Norwegian – who is a member of the country’s conservative-leaning populist ‘Progress Party’ – said he was not nominating Trump to win favour with the president.
‘I’m not a big Trump supporter,’ he insisted. ‘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.’
The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded president Obama for his ‘extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people’.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited Obama’s promotion of nuclear nonproliferation and a ‘new climate’ in international relations, pointing to his efforts in reaching out to the Muslim world, but drew mixed reactions in the U.S.
He was awarded the prize just 263 days after taking office, with Lech Walesa, Poland’s former president and a 1983 Nobel laureate saying: ‘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 sounded surprised in his comments following the away, saying: ‘To be honest, 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.’
