Norwegian official nominates Trump for Nobel prize, citing Israel-UAE agreement

A member of the Norwegian Parliament has nominated President Trump for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for his role brokering relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a four-term member of Parliament and chairman of the Norwegian delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, submitted the nomination to the Nobel Committee. 

“For his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees,” Tybring-Gjedde said of Trump during an interview with Fox News.

Trump announced last month that the U.S. was helping to support the full normalization of ties between Israel and UAE, a historic breakthrough in relations in the Middle East and part of the administration’s efforts to shore up support against Iran.

As part of the agreement, Israel would halt efforts to annex territory in the West Bank that was outlined in Trump’s plan for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.

UAE also officially ended is boycott against Israel, opening up trade, commerce and air travel between the two countries.

In the nomination letter, Tybring-Gjedde said the Trump administration played an important role in thawing relations between the two countries.

“As it is expected other Middle Eastern countries will follow in the footsteps of the UAE, this agreement could be a game changer that will turn the Middle East into a region of cooperation and prosperity,” he wrote.

He also cited Trump’s “key role in facilitating contact between conflicting parties and … creating new dynamics in other protracted conflicts, such as the Kashmir border dispute between India and Pakistan, and the conflict between North and South Korea, as well as dealing with the nuclear capabilities of North Korea.”

Tybring-Gjedde, who is a member of Norway’s conservative-leaning Progress Party, also praised Trump for withdrawing troops from the Middle East.

“Indeed, Trump has broken a 39-year-old streak of American Presidents either starting a war or bringing the United States into an international armed conflict. The last president to avoid doing so was Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter,” he wrote.

This is not the first time Tybring-Gjedde has nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 2018, he joined lawmaker Per-Willy Amundsen in praising Trump for signing an agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to work toward the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reportedly also nominated the U.S. leader, but Trump did not win. 

Tybring-Gjedde insisted that his nomination of Trump was not an attempt to get in the president’s good graces.

“I’m not a big Trump supporter,” he said. “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.”

Former President Obama was awarded the prestigious prize less than a year into his presidency for what the committee described as, “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

Obama said at the time in 2009 that he was “surprised and deeply humbled” by the honor, saying he did not feel like he deserved to be in the company of past winners. 

Trump has long insisted that he be recognized by the Nobel Committee, saying in 2018 that “everyone thinks” he deserves the award.

Last year, he suggested that the selection was rigged, saying that he would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for a lot of things if they gave it out fairly.”

“They gave one to Obama immediately upon his ascent to the presidency, and he had no idea why he got it,” Trump said. “And you know what? That was the only thing I agreed with him on.”

In April, his frustration peaked when he railed against the Nobel Prize in a series of tweets that went viral for repeatedly spelling it as the “Noble Prize.”

“Does anybody get the meaning of what a so-called Noble (not Nobel) Prize is, especially as it pertains to Reporters and Journalists?” he wrote. “Noble is defined as, ‘having or showing fine personal qualities or high moral principles and ideals.’” 

“Does sarcasm ever work?” he added.

Three other presidents besides Obama have won the prestigious peace award. President Theodore Roosevelt won it in 1906 for “having negotiated peace in the Russo-Japanese war.” President Woodrow Wilson won the prize in 1920 for being the “leading architect of the League of Nations” and Carter won it in 2002 for “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts.”

The recipient is selected by a five-person Nobel Committee, which is appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. The winner of the Peace Prize for 2021 will not be announced until October of next year.