Openly campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize is, to be charitable, tacky. But so is Donald Trump, which is why he and his White House team are doing it.
“President Trump has brokered, on average, about one peace deal or ceasefire per month during his six months in office,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt three weeks ago. “It’s well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” You will not be surprised that most of these “deals” are superficial or overhyped, as The New York Times recently explained.
Trump believes an agreement ending the war between Russia and Ukraine would give him an unassailable claim to the prize. And he believes the fastest way to get an agreement is to redraw the map, allowing Russia to take a chunk of Ukraine.
But if such pillage is allowed, Trump will not be creating a more peaceful world. He will set a precedent for the strongest military powers to grab whatever land they want by force.
Only three American presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize while in office. Barack Obama, most recently, won it only months after entering office. In his acceptance address, Obama acknowledged the honor was premature, saying, “Compared to some of the giants of history who’ve received this prize—Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela—my accomplishments are slight,” although he proceeded to articulate a vision for practical peacemaking with international cooperation. And I would argue that by the end of his presidency, he had lived up to the expectations of the prize with the Iranian nuclear agreement, even though his successor, Trump, had quickly undermined it.
Teddy Roosevelt won it first, brokering a treaty between Russia and Japan. But that agreement was designed to manage imperialism, not end it.
The other presidential recipient of the Peace Prize is the most interesting and historically consequential: Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson’s reputation has taken an understandable beating in recent years, as modern eyes do not look kindly on his defense of reinstated racial segregation in several federal government departments, his enactment of the anti-free speech Sedition Act, and the imprisonment of Eugene Debs for violating that act.
The historical assessment of Wilson’s peacemaking record has always been complicated. The Peace Prize was a bittersweet footnote to his presidency. He was recognized for securing the creation of the League of Nations in the Treaty of Versailles, which ended what was then called the Great War. But by December 1920, when the prize was announced, the U.S. Senate had rejected ratification of the treaty and League membership. Wilson, who had a debilitating stroke while traveling across the country to rally support, was unable to advocate for ratification, and Republican Warren Harding just won a landslide election to succeed Wilson by running against Wilson’s internationalist approach.
(All Wilson got out of the prize was $40,000—a meaningful amount in a time when ex-presidents did not receive government pensions.)
Wilson was also honored by the Nobel committee for his vision of lasting world peace articulated in his 14 Points address to Congress. Wilson, envisioning what became the League, proposed “a general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” Another complimentary principle was “a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.”
But to get the League into the Versailles treaty, Wilson made wrenching compromises with countries that did not share his vision. During the war, Japan wrested Chinese territory from Germany, then known as Shantung. China wanted it back. Wilson sympathized with China, but felt he needed Japan in the League. He was stuck between principles. As described by his press secretary Ray Stannard Baker in a diary entry:
Historian John Milton Cooper, Jr. assessed, “Shantung would hurt his campaign to gain support in America for the treaty and the League more than any other single issue, with the possible exception of [resisting independence for] Ireland. In the longer run, this decision would open him to the charge that he placed too much faith in the League of Nations.” Though Cooper defends Wilson: “critics would maintain that he had given away too much on territorial, colonial, and financial matters to gain support for the League. Those charges would be wrong. Shantung offered the sole example of Wilson’s consciously making a concession for the League, and he also decided as he did because of the realistic calculation that he could not force the Japanese out.”
Whether or not you agree with Cooper’s favorable view of Wilson, two facts remain. Wilson’s compromises contemporaneously contributed to his loss of the argument in the Senate and with the public. Yet Wilson’s powerful vision persisted and was eventually realized with the creation of the United Nations. That’s because a former Wilson administration official named Franklin D. Roosevelt carried it to the presidency, forging the Atlantic Charter with Winston Churchill and laying the groundwork for the creation of the United Nations. (And also thanks to those who finished the job after Roosevelt’s death, President Harry Truman and Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, whom I’ve previously profiled.)
And Wilson’s vision was explicitly anti-imperial. Because of his vision, the United Nations created a post-World War II Trusteeship Council, successfully moving the globe away from colonialization. No longer would the great powers thirst for conquest, spark global conflict, and redraw maps based on who flexed the most military might.
What President Trump is trying to do with Ukraine, in perverse pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize, is turn the clock back to before Wilson’s time and restore the era of great power imperialism. While Wilson pushed reluctant countries away from imperialism, Trump is facing resistance from European leaders who still believe in today’s liberal world order.
Trump already legitimizes illiberalism with rhetoric designed to weaken Ukraine’s leverage. On Fox News this week, Trump said, “Russia is a powerful military nation. You know, whether people like it or not, it’s a powerful nation. It’s a much bigger nation. It’s not a war that should have been started. You don’t do that. You don’t take on a nation that’s 10 times your size.” Setting aside the grotesque propagandistic lie that Ukraine started the war, Trump is articulating a world order in which “powerful” and “bigger” nations should be allowed to have their way with less powerful and smaller nations. Wilsonian principles of sovereignty and self-determination be damned.
Whatever tenuous peace might result from conceding land to Russia in the short term, the long view looks extremely dark. After abrogating the Wilsonian principles that underpin the United Nations and have prevented imperialistic world wars for the past 80 years, Russia, China, and perhaps even America—if we are to take Trump’s words about Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal seriously—would be incentivized to pursue imperial designs violently.
Wilson earned a Nobel Peace Prize by doing all he could—including pushing his physical health to the brink—to build an institution to prevent world wars, end colonialism, and support self-determination. Trump may call himself a peacemaker, but he has no interest in the principles and structures with the proven capacity to maintain a lasting peace among nations. Trump wants to make the world safe for autocracy. For that, he deserves no prize.
The post Woodrow Wilson Has Something Donald Trump Desperately Wants appeared first on Washington Monthly.
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