The Nobel Peace Prize's Big Miss
Prima facie, Maria Corina Machado is an excellent choice for the Nobel Peace Prize. What more powerful message could be sent to the world in the era of Donald Trump than to name a Latin-American woman who fights against an authoritarian government to reestablish democracy? But the more I learn about her, the more I realise Trump actually won this round.
A scathing article published Friday by Michelle Ellner in Peoples Dispatch is a damning indictment of the award and its most recent recipient.
When Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize 16 years ago, there was a widespread feeling that he had principally received it for the simple fact of not being George W. Bush. Obama was visibly embarrassed by the award, for which he had been nominated just 12 days into his presidency.
After years of wars that achieved little other than improving the lives of western oligarchs while unilaterally withdrawing from key international treaties, the world had had enough of President George W. Bush. Since his departure, history has been undeservedly kind to him. It is difficult, however, to overstate the international feeling in January of 2009 when Obama won office on a campaign with the simplest slogan: “hope.”
What would cause a campaign premised on “hope” to win if people had felt hope under his predecessor?
The prize in 2009 was a specific message from the international community through the Nobel committee to the United States, sharing in that hope. They gave Obama the award for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” otherwise known as a ‘positive election campaign'.
Two generations earlier, Canadian diplomat Lester B. Pearson, who had been instrumental in splitting Palestine into separate Muslim and Jewish territories in 1948 at the nascent United Nations, received the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize “for his crucial contribution to the deployment of a United Nations Emergency Force in the wake of the Suez Crisis” the previous year. This has made him widely seen as the “father of modern peacekeeping.” He did not become Prime Minister for another five years after receiving the award.
This week, the world is celebrating an apparent and tenuous end to the two-year old war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza strip — the same week as the Nobel Peace Prize was announced. President Trump has been demanding this prize since retaking office and it is not unreasonable to suspect the timing of the peace deal in that context. It was, after all, Benjamin Netanyahu who nominated Trump for it, and posted an AI-generated video of Trump winning the day before the real winner was announced.
The trouble here is that there is now significant evidence that the peace deal was mostly negotiated back in July of 2024 under former US president Joe Biden. The date is significant, because on July 26, 2024, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, after which progress on the deal largely fell apart.
It is worth noting that Netanyahu is facing a series of charges related to corruption that are on hold due to his role as Prime Minister. Like his friend Donald Trump, holding onto power is a question of his own survival, not that of his people. If anyone were to win the prize for the current peace deal — should it even survive a week — it should be Joe Biden.
Back, then, to the 2025 Nobel laureate, Maria Corina Machado, who won “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
Across the Muslim world, there are calls for her prize to be stripped. The silence of western media on this is interesting. A deeper dive into her background and values should be getting the rest of us just as mad. In February, days after Donald Trump reclaimed the White House, the European far-right alliance including shining lights like Hungarian right-wing pro-Russian authoritarian Viktor Orban and French extremist Marine Le Pen, met in Madrid. Among the special guest appearances was a video greeting from none other than Maria Corina Machado. Six weeks later, Benjamin Netanyahu invited a wider overlapping collection of right-wing extremists to a conference on anti-semitism in Jerusalem, notably including Argentinian president Javier Milei, whose collapsing right-wing government Trump just propped up with a US$20 billion bailout.
Left-wing authoritarians like Nicolas Maduro and right-wing authoritarians like Donald Trump are both authoritarians that need to be opposed for the sake of restoring democratic self-determination. Venezuelan opposition leader Machado has called on the west to intervene militarily in her country to remove Maduro, and Trump has been building up his naval presence off their coast, with a 5th boat blown out of the water killing its occupants by the US Navy yesterday.
The evidence suggests that Machado is not so much interested in restoring actual democracy to Venezuela, but rather in replacing the left-wing authoritarian state with a right-wing authoritarian state. If anything, her award is an endorsement of Trump’s military buildup in the region and the right-wing extremism that both he and Machado represent.
This year’s Nobel Prize ultimately achieved the opposite of what it intended.