President Donald Trump has finally been recognized for the success of his unorthodox diplomacy, receiving a nomination Wednesday for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize in light of his redoubled efforts to encourage nonviolent conflict resolution in the Middle East.
Here are four compelling reasons Trump deserves the award:
1. The Israel-UAE peace deal
According to an exclusive Fox News interview with nominating Norwegian lawmaker Christian Tybring-Gjedde, Trump was named for a shot at the award predominantly as a result of his newly brokered and fully fledged peace between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
On Aug. 13, a meeting between Israeli and Emirati diplomats facilitated by the Trump administration ended with the inking of an agreement which will make UAE the third Arab nation to establish direct ties with Israel, while also halting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s annexation of lands sought by ethnic Palestinian leadership in the region, The Associated Press reported.
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The meeting signals an end to hostilities and opposing boycotts between the two nations, opening the door to direct travel and further partnership on such issues as security, telecommunications, energy, tourism and health care.
Trump celebrated the “historic” peace deal on Twitter that morning, having cited it as a necessary ice-breaker on the road to recognition and acceptance of Israel by the wider Islamic community, from the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Peninsula and beyond.
“This deal is a significant step towards building a more peaceful, secure and prosperous Middle East,” Trump said in an Oval Office announcement of the deal.
“Now that the ice has been broken, I expect more Arab and Muslim countries will follow the United Arab Emirates’ lead.”
2. Successful economic reintroduction of Serbia and Kosovo
The Trump administration also scored a Nobel Peace Prize-worthy diplomatic victory in Eastern Europe this month, brokering an economic normalization agreement between Serbia and Kosovo.
Like many nations in the Balkans, The Associated Press reported, Serbia and Kosovo have a contentious and bloody history, with the latter declaring independence from the former in 2008 — just two years after Montenegro separated from Serbia following nearly two decades of war and ethnic conflict stemming from the post-Cold War dissolution of Yugoslavia.
With a large ethnically Albanian-Muslim population, Kosovo had rebelled against Serbia in 1998, accusing the larger Christian province of repressive occupation. A brutal Serbian military response in turn prompted NATO intervention the following year, and international peacekeepers were called in to keep the provinces from each other’s throats.
The eventual Kosovan parliamentary declaration of independence under international protection prompted widespread backlash, with most Western powers opting to recognize the nation, while Russia, China and several small European Union members sided with Serbia.
Relations between the two nations have been turbulent and at times nonexistent since — but increased efforts to bring the two powers to the negotiating table under the Trump administration paid off on Sept. 4, as an economic agreement was reached which would increase cross-border commerce and see both states opening embassies in Jerusalem.
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“I’m pleased to announce a truly historic commitment,” Trump said, flanked by Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and Kosovo’s Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti in an Oval Office announcement of the agreement. “Serbia and Kosovo have each committed to economic normalization.”
“After a violent and tragic history and years of failed negotiations, my administration proposed a new way of bridging the divide. By focusing on job creation and economic growth, the two countries were able to reach a major breakthrough,” the president said.
3. Middle East troop drawdowns
Further bolstering Trump’s claim to the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize are consistent and unapologetic efforts by the current administration to halt seemingly “endless” American involvement in Middle Eastern armed conflict.
Those efforts come as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fast approach two decades in length, having begun on the heels of the tragic Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and costing the United States a combined 7,000 lives by January 2020, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs.
International data compiled by the institute in November 2018 further revealed the war on terror’s wider death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan was as high as 442,294.
The Trump administration, however, remains ahead of schedule in efforts to further dial back U.S. involvement in those conflicts, announcing thousand-man troop withdrawals from both nations this month.
According to official remarks delivered Tuesday by Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., head of the U.S. Central Command, roughly 1,200 soldiers will return home from Iraq in the coming weeks, followed shortly thereafter by 4,100 more from Afghanistan for a total regional drawdown of roughly 38 percent.
The president also caught heavy flak for his regional non-intervention strategy in October 2019, earning the ire of Washington insiders and international elites alike when he withdrew an American tripwire force from northeastern Syria after months of continued support for Kurdish rebel forces in light of a global coalition victory over the Islamic State.
4. The bar for entry isn’t that high these days
Ensuring beyond a shadow of a doubt, however, that Trump’s case for the award holds water is not actually a specific accomplishment, but a genuine lack of merit on the part of previous Nobel Peace Prize recipients.
“I’m not a big Trump supporter,” Tybring-Gjedde told Fox News upon nominating the president, but later justified his decision saying, “The committee should look at the facts and judge him on the facts — not on the way he behaves sometimes.”
“The people who have received the Peace Prize in recent years have done much less than Donald Trump,” the Norwegian lawmaker added.
And right he is.
Former President Barack Obama was named a Nobel Peace Prize winner just 263 days into his Oval Office tenure for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people,” as well as having “captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”
To his credit, Obama quickly admitted he did not deserve the award on the basis of achievement, according to The New York Times.
The 44th president would go on to prove that statement true when he came up short on promises to end Bush-era “boots on the ground” conflict in the Middle East, personally authorizing 563 deadly covert strikes in what eventually became the longest wartime presidential tenure in U.S. history.
He was far from the only undeserving recipient of the modern era, however, with aggressive anti-Zionist Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat chosen in 1994 for coming to the peace table after decades of military assaults on Israel, and the European Union as a whole chosen in 2012 despite an inability to quell the Balkan wars, CNBC reported.
All things considered, Trump ought to be a shoo-in for that award.
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