Trump’s Peace Prize dream squashed? Nobel committee has this to say

Donald Trump's obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize does not seem to have reached the Norwegian Nobel Institute. Every year, the members of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee meet to select the winner, but its director, Kristian Berg Harpviken, says that the American president's quest has “really has no impact on the discussions that are going on in the committee.”

While the director believes that “peace is always political,” he also stresses that only “the merits of the individual candidate” matter.

Donald Trump, a 79-year-old billionaire, has taken every opportunity to say he "deserves it", claiming to have ended six wars, even though those in Gaza and Ukraine -- which he says he wants to resolve -- continue to rage.

The official said the committee had already received 338 nominations this year. He clarified that just being nominated isn’t “a great achievement.”

Those eligible include members of parliament and cabinet ministers from every country in the world, former laureates and some university professors. Thousands or even tens of thousands of people are therefore able to put a name forward.

This year the committee will pick the winner from a longlist of 338 individuals and organisations. The list is kept secret for 50 years.

The most worthy candidates make it onto a shortlist, with each name then evaluated by an expert.

While the five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are nominated by Norway's parliament, the committee insists its decisions are taken independently of party politics and the sitting government.

A case in point is that it ignored the Norwegian government's discreet warnings and awarded the 2010 prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, sparking a diplomatic deep freeze between Beijing and Oslo that lasted for years.

"The Nobel Committee acts entirely independently and cannot allow itself to take those considerations into account when it discusses individual candidates," Berg Harpviken said.

Norway is a firm believer in the multilateralism that prize creator Alfred Nobel defended in his lifetime but which has been upended by Trump's "America First" policy.

This year's laureate will be announced on October 10.

Trump's peace record

Trump has backed up his claim that he deserves the prize by pointing out that several foreign leaders, from Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu to Azerbaijan's Ilham Aliyev, have either nominated him or backed his nomination.

Trump believes that he deserves the peace prize for ending a total of “seven wars” after taking office in January. His claims includes the conflicts between Thailand and Cambodia, DRC and Rwanda, Armenia and Azerbaijan and even India and Pakistan, but the jury is still out on that.

However, they would have to have been extremely quick, or prescient, for this year's prize given that nominations had to be submitted by January 31, just 11 days after Trump took office.