The Nobel committee in Oslo loved Barack Obama, who famously received the Peace Prize less than nine months into his presidential tenure just for creating a “new climate.”
Later, as Obama waged war across the Middle East and spread into Africa, killing hundreds or thousands with drone strikes, the committee’s ex-secretary Geir Lundestad said they erred.
“Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake,” he said. “In that sense the committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.”
Ya’ think?
But President Trump has made great strides in bringing about the end to the Korean War, and to establishing a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula. In June, Trump will meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore for peace talks that have, so far, anyway, offered hope for an end to the decades-long standoff.
How good have Trump’s efforts been? Even the worst president in U.S. history, Democrat Jimmy Carter, thinks the Nobel committee should bestow its Peace Prize on the president this year.
“If President Trump is successful in getting a peace treaty that’s acceptable to both sides with North Korea, I think he certainly ought to be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize,” Carter said in a podcast interview with Politico. “I think it would be a worthy and a momentous accomplishment that no previous president has been able to realize.”
Carter, who himself has won a Nobel Peace Prize, said sanctions, no matter how strong, have not been effective.
“The North Korean people ought to be treated with respect, and I think that the embargo that we’ve enforced on them has basically hurt the people who are already suffering under a brutal dictatorship, and has not hurt the leaders of North Korea very much,” Carter said.
“I think that the next mediator, next negotiator — maybe President Trump, I hope — will reassure them that we’re willing to give up some of those things — the threat of attack on them and to lift the embargo,” he said. “That would be a cheap price, in my opinion, to pay for a cessation of their nuclear program.”