Trump and the Nobel Peace Prize
Donald Trump has one fixation these past few days: he wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize.This summer, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed the candidate, and the US President himself, without much modesty, has put himself forward for the award.
This On Friday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee will name this year's winner., and it could be an opportunity to see which direction the world is moving in. Throughout history, some Nobel Prize winners have been controversial, especially if we look at them from our perspective. A Trump victory would undoubtedly be controversial, although it wouldn't be a huge surprise.
Another figure who, in the eyes of his followers, qualifies for the prize is Benjamin Netanyahu. There have been voices in this regard in Israel, although the prime minister is under arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes and genocide.
Just the day before the prize was awarded, Trump wanted to be the first to announce the agreement for a ceasefire in Gaza, which was finally reached thanks to his pressure and in accordance with a plan he himself proposed.
If Trump had wanted, the war could have ended shortly after he took office last January, but that is a reality he didn't want. On the contrary, he has provided Netanyahu with everything he has asked for in terms of weapons, and that support has enabled the continuation of the genocide.
The very idea that Trump and Netanyahu could be considered candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize speaks volumes about the 21st-century world in which we live, a world that journalist Robert D. Kaplan finds reminiscent of the Weimar Republic. Back then, in the 1920s, the German cultural and social world was in full swing, but politics collapsed, and within a few months, Hitler arrived.
Kaplan is no radical in the Western sense of the word. Although in his recent book Wasteland He doesn't say it; in his youth he enlisted in the Israeli army, and today he's an analyst with a notable international reputation and a constant lecturer. The impression one gets from reading the book is that we're dealing with a full-fledged militarist.
A New World Order
However, the references to Trump in the book are not very positive. They reflect the general opinion in the Western world, specifically among liberal intellectuals who live within old parameters that are rapidly crumbling. In this context, Kaplan insists that our world is very similar to that of the Weimar Republic.
Curiously, what worries Kaplan most is that the idea of disorder prevails in the world. This recalls Goethe when he said that injustice is preferable to disorder, an approach that Kaplan tacitly approves of. Trump and Netanyahu go into politics because they want to restore order to Western society, a society with weak benchmarks in all disciplines, i.e., non-authoritarian.
The American president still has four years to win the Nobel Prize. If he succeeds in any of the four years, it will be a clear sign of the transformation that Western society is undergoing, confirming that the dominant liberalism of recent decades has definitively fallen in favor of the conservative, and even reactionary, ideas represented by Trump and Netanyahu.