By Kevin Jon Williams, JNS
While Nobel Prizes in science go to well-deserving candidates, the peace award has been given to people and groups that fail to live up to its promise.
Awards are a two-way street. They honor the recipients, of course, but the track record of a group’s past recipients also enhances or detracts from the value of any award.
If U.S. President Donald Trump ever does receive a Nobel Peace Prize, he and his successful peace deals will bring much more prestige to the award (if he chooses to accept it) than it will bring to him.
The three Nobel Prizes in the sciences—physics; chemistry; and physiology or medicine—are administered by Sweden and have maintained high prestige through relatively consistent choices of deserving, high-quality honorees. Discoveries of the Higgs boson, the nature of the chemical bond, penicillin and insulin add luster to the respective prizes. With only a few exceptions, the Nobel committees for these sciences have resolved controversies over individual credit correctly or at least justifiably.
But the Nobel Peace Prize is different. It’s administered by Norway, and its track record is atrocious in both the recipients and the people the Norwegian Nobel Committee has overlooked.
Undeserving U.S. presidents who received the Nobel Peace Prize:
U.S. President Barack H. Obama (2009): Obama was awarded it after fewer than eight months in office. Domestically, Americans had been promised that the election of Obama, whose ancestry is half-African, would bring a post-racial America. Instead, he became a divisive figure who brought us a hyper-racial America. Internationally, he had one failure after another. The worst of them was giving pallets of cash and a path to nuclear weapons and ICBMs to rescue a medieval, theocratic dictatorship on the brink of collapse—the formerly great country of Iran. Even his symbolism was bad. Saudi Arabia officially abolished slavery only in 1962, and the practice there persisted even afterward. Yet Obama bowed low and deep in public to Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud, a man who had personally owned black people.
U.S. President Jimmy Carter (2002): He allowed the takeover of Iran, a former ally, by the ayatollahs—medieval theocratic dictators who have become the major modern source of terrorism worldwide. Later, as a former president, he and the Carter Center endorsed the corrupt Venezuelan government’s tally of the 2004 election to recall Hugo Chávez, keeping the leader in power despite convincing evidence of fraud. This action remains relevant to this day, as Venezuela still suffers under dictatorial rule by Chávez’s hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro. The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was just awarded to Maria Corina Machado for her efforts to restore democracy to that country, despite Carter’s destructive efforts.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson (1919): Despite stiff competition, Wilson remains a serious contender for the title of worst U.S. president ever. Yet the Nobel Committee honored Wilson “for his role as founder of the League of Nations,” the ineffective precursor to the disastrous United Nations. During his presidency, with his wife Edith (who illegally seized de facto presidency for a year after her husband’s stroke), Wilson mandated racial segregation of the federal government, until then the largest desegregated workforce in the United States; revived the Ku Klux Klan; curtailed American civil liberties in peacetime; and expanded the power and finances of the federal government. In 1916, Wilson won a close re-election under the campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war,” a promise he quickly broke. Advocating for American involvement in World War I, he famously urged that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” The war was a catastrophe that ended mildly authoritarian regimes in Europe, contributing to the rise of the murderous Nazi regime and Soviet Socialist totalitarianism under the USSR, and set the stage for World War II and the Cold War.
Mass murderers and enablers who received it:
Yasser Arafat (1994): Head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, this terrorist murderer was closely allied with Black September, the group that carried out the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. Arafat was rewarded two years later by giving an address before the U.N. General Assembly, holding a gun (this last bit of information is proudly displayed on the Nobel Foundation’s official webpage on Arafat’s peace prize). He shared the award with then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin and then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Arafat and the organizations he led, particularly the PLO and Palestinian Authority, have consistently violated terms of the Oslo Accords by indoctrinating schoolchildren in Jew-hatred and instituting the “pay for slay” stipends for terrorists who kill Jews—now illegal under the U.S. Taylor Force Act. He helped launch the Second Intifada, a wave of suicide bombings on buses, and in hotels and restaurants, against civilians in Israel from 2000 to 2005 (he died in November 2004). That began a few months after Arafat rejected an offer for Palestinian statehood during the 2000 Camp David negotiations led by then-President Bill Clinton.
Le Duc Tho (1973): North Vietnam’s chief negotiator, Tho was awarded, but declined, the Nobel Peace Prize along with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, after the American and South Vietnamese armies successfully forced the communist dictatorship of North Vietnam to recognize an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam as part of the 1973 Paris Accords. But following the Watergate scandal, the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon and decisive congressional victories by Democrats in 1974, the dictators of North Vietnam once again attacked. The result was boat people and other refugees fleeing the Communists, and, for those who remained in Vietnam, gulags, re-education camps, and the oppression of Vietnamese Buddhists and Christians.
Corrupt, dishonest or destructive organizations that received it:
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), a branch of the United Nations that promotes climate alarmism.
The United Nations (2001), a corrupt organization dominated by dictatorships.
The so-called U.N. Peacekeeping Forces (1988), whose members commit rape from Haiti to Somalia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the Central African Republic and beyond.
Amnesty International (1977) “for worldwide respect for human rights” despite credible accusations of institutional racism; harassment of women employees; money laundering in India and Zimbabwe; and ideological biases, including false accusations against Israel, while barely criticizing the murder, torture, burnings, rape and hostage-taking by Hamas and “ordinary” Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF, 1965), an organization that has accumulated a record of embezzlement and sexual abuse.
American Friends Service Committee (1947), a Quaker organization that quickly lost its way to “become a group that remains silent on the incarceration of Chinese Uyghurs, dines with Holocaust deniers and works with Hamas terrorists who openly call for the murder of homosexuals.”
Meritorious U.S. presidents who did not receive it:
U.S. President Harry S. Truman was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but the committee never honored him. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis) occupied Norway during World War II. You’d think the Norwegians would be grateful for the victory of America and its allies in World War II, which brought peace and freedom to Western Europe and Scandinavia, including Norway. But, no.
U.S. President Ronald Reagan presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet the Nobel committee chose to give the 1990 peace prize to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev alone. “How can the loser of the Cold War that represented repression and totalitarianism be a more worthy recipient but not the ideological victor?” You might think that Norway would be grateful for America’s defeat of the Soviet empire, given that it was a lot closer to them.
As for Trump, the president should stop trying to win a prize from a foreign organization with such a poor track record. His own record is so much better.
