And the winner is … not Donald Trump. That the US president didn’t get his much-coveted award is probably going to be the enduring memory of the 2025 Nobel peace prize.
This year’s recipient is María Corina Machado, leader of Venzuela’s opposition movement. The Norwegian Nobel committee awarded her the prize “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela, and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy”.
Machado’s efforts are laudable and she deserves praise for her personal courage standing up to Venezuela’s strong-man ruler, Nicolás Maduro. What is less apparent is how her selection fits with the award criteria as specified in Alfred Nobel’s will.
Nobel wanted the recipient to be “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”. It’s open to debate whether Machado fits those criteria.
In fact, the entire process surrounding the 2025 Nobel peace prize has been highly unusual, in the way it has involved very public lobbying for a particular candidate. Trump himself has used every conceivable opportunity to push for the award – even his speech before the UN general assembly on September 23, when he reiterated an earlier claim to have “solved seven wars” that he made on August 19.
Those claims have been widely called into question, with good reason. Tenuous ceasefires are the closest that Trump got in some of the actual wars in which intervened.
This would not necessarily have ruled him out of the competition – the criteria do not require success and allow for effort to be rewarded. Yet even then, his chances for success were remote, given that nominations close on January 31, after which a shortlist is developed from late February and deliberations commence.
At that stage, the US president had arguably played a role in a temporary ceasefire in the war in Gaza – but most of his subsequent claims had yet to come to pass.
Nobel controversies
There have been controversial choices for the Nobel peace prize before: Henry Kissinger and Abiy Ahmed Ali, to name just two.
Kissinger won the prize in 1973 for ending the Vietnam war, together with Le Duc Tho, the principal Vietnamese negotiator who declined the prize. But while Kissinger negotiated the end of that war as US secretary of state, he was also notorious for his devastating bombing campaign against Cambodia from 1969 to 1973, among other things,.
Read more: The Nobel peace prize has a record of being awarded to controversial nominees
Abiy was awarded the 2019 prize “for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea”. But that did not stop him from fighting a vicious civil war against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which has cost the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Trump clearly looks a better candidate in comparison to Abiy and Kissinger. But now compare him with three other past US presidents who won the prize.
Theodore Roosevelt won in 1906 for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese war. Woodrow Wilson won in 1919 for founding the League of Nations. And Jimmy Carter won in 2002 for decades of work promoting peaceful conflict resolution, democracy and human rights. Against these, Trump’s track record of success looks shakier.
Shaky track record
While he deserves some credit for his efforts and at least some temporary successes, Trump has no spotless track record as a peacemaker. His eight months in office since re-entering the White House in January 2025 are hardly an advertisement for criteria set out by Alfred Nobel.
Trump has threatened to annex Greenland and incorporate Canada as the 51st state of the US, joined Israel in bombing Iran during the so-called 12-day war, and carried out a deadly campaign of airstrikes against alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers.
This mixture of peacemaking and warmongering sets Trump apart from the fourth US president to win the prize, Barack Obama, who won in 2009 “for efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. This too was a controversial choice at the time as it was mostly aspirational, given Obama’s lack of track record as president in the early months of his administration.
Perhaps the best outcome of the 2025 Nobel peace prize saga, and the fact Trump did not win, might be that the US president now doubles down on his peacemaking efforts. He has gone on the record as having ended seven wars, and now has another potential success with the Gaza ceasefire deal.
If he wants to remain in contention for the 2026 award, Trump can’t afford for his grandiose claims to be proved wrong. If he succeeds in preventing any of these conflicts from flaring up again, a service to peace will have been done – and it shouldn’t matter that it was done by Trump, or what his ultimate motivation was.
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