Washington Post Columnist Argues Trump is a Nobel Peace Prize Contender

The Washington Post, even after owner Jeff Bezos’s shakeups, is anything but a publication friendly to Republicans or the Trump administration. But even members of the legacy media sometimes have to admit the obvious.

One of those is Washington Post Marc A. Thiessen, who on Thursday penned a piece making the case for President Trump being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This isn’t a new notion; the idea’s been kicked around before. But the calls seem to be getting louder.

Not only does Donald Trump deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, but there has arguably never been an American president who deserved it more.

Four of his predecessors have won the prize. Barack Obama won seven months into his presidency essentially for not being George W. Bush — and even he said he didn’t deserve it. Woodrow Wilson won for creating the League of Nations, which proved to be a feckless disaster that the United States never even joined. Theodore Roosevelt won for ending a single conflict, the Russo-Japanese War, which began with Japan’s 1904 attack on the Russian fleet in Manchuria (Japan later launched a full invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and then a surprise attack on the U.S. in 1941). Jimmy Carter won in 2002, more than two decades after leaving the White House, for a lifetime of work in peacemaking, beginning with the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt.

Barack Obama was, yes, given a Nobel Prize for existing, which was a rather obvious pander. Probably the only president who really won the Peace Prize for actually, you know, working for peace, was Theodore Roosevelt, who negotiated the end of the Russo-Japanese War.

By way of contrast, Mr. Thiessen points out President Trump’s accomplishments along these lines:

Contrast this with Trump’s record. In his first term, Trump brokered not one, not two, not three, but four Arab-Israeli peace accords — the first such agreements in more than a quarter-century. He did it by rejecting the failed conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment, which said that there could be no separate peace without the Palestinians and that moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and confronting Iran’s aggression would inflame the region and put peace out of reach. Those moves did the opposite. The Abraham Accords alone were an achievement worthy of a Nobel Prize.

And, of course, the Peace Prize hasn’t meant all that much since they gave one to Yasser Arafat. But this could redeem it, to some extent, at least.