The Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 is being awarded to the Venezuelan politician Maria Cosina Machado. The Norwegian Nobel Committee gives reasons for its decisions and their justification of the award says that she is “ . . . one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times”. She has resolutely opposed the civilian dictator Nicolas Maduro. She herself has indicated that Donald Trump, who was nominated twice, would have been a worthy recipient. He is, of course, also a fairly determined opponent of Maduro. There is a fairly obvious difference between the Norwegian Committee which gives that prize and the Swedish one which gives the Literature Prize which is fairly consistently and obviously “left” in its leanings. “Peace” turns out to be a fairly promiscuous concept.
Actually, if you held a party for the nominees for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize it might be rather fun though probably far from peaceful. The long list was 338 individuals and organisations, but even the shorter list of confirmed nominees would be exceptionally diverse. It included Pakistani politician and former world cup winning cricket captain Imran Khan and the pope as well as both Donald Trump and Elon Musk. The former is nominated twice for what must be treated as unconsummated efforts in the Ukraine and the Middle East and the latter by Slovenian politician Branko Grims “ . . . for his consistent commitment to freedom of expression and thus to peace”. This is a contradiction to a modern orthodoxy because a majority of the authorities in the world seem to have convinced themselves that free speech will inevitably lead to conflict. If you look at the record of the Norwegian Nobel Committee you are likely to conclude that “peace” is a concept which has no boundaries with all other good things including war and quickly move on to quoting Orwell on language and politics.
It was ever thus. Barack Obama and Theodore Roosevelt were US presidents who were awarded the prize. The latter was particularly controversial: the former leader of the Texas Rough Riders he was no stranger to violence. He built up US armed forces, virtually annexed the Philippines and was considered by many on the left to be a warmonger. He was awarded the prize in 1906 for his part in bringing the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 to a conclusion. It was a highly controversial award as was that to Henry Kissinger who as US Secretary of State was awarded the prize jointly in 1973 with Le Duc Tho for arranging a truce in the Vietnam War. The truce didn’t last, Le Duc Tho turned his share down and by the time he received the prize Kissinger was ordering the bombing of Cambodia and dealing with demands to indict him as a war criminal.
It has often been said that the reason the Peace Prize (and possibly the other Nobel Prizes) exist is down to a mistake by a French writer of obituaries. Alfred Nobel’s elder brother, Ludvig, died in 1888 aged 56 and the obituary confused him, an oil magnate and one of the richest men in the world, with Alfred, remarking that as the inventor of dynamite, among many other things including other explosives, he was probably responsible for more deaths than anyone else in the nineteenth century. Alfred’s conscience was stirred and he determined that his vast fortune should be used to do good and to further the cause of peace. This often repeated story appears to have been myth since nobody can definitively name the French newspaper let alone locate a copy. But the myth is not misleading because Alfred Nobel clearly was troubled by the uses to which his inventions had been put and wanted his fortune used to make amends.
Nobel, himself a Swede from Stockholm, lived his life in the period of the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway. He died in 1896 and the two countries split apart in 1905; Norway retained the Peace Prize, Sweden all the others and it is awarded in a simpler way than the Swedish prizes by the Norwegian Nobel Committee which has strong links to the Storting, the Norwegian parliament. It is presented on Nobel’s birthday, December 10th. The award has always been unavoidably political, often controversial and sometimes risible at least to some eyes. The Roosevelt award, for example, is usually seen in the context of a newly independent Norway currying favour with an incipient superpower.
The committee has awarded 131 peace prizes to date and it is clear that their arguments pull them constantly in three different directions. First there are powerful men and women who are not generally particularly peaceful but, for whatever reason, do something which brings about peace in a particular situation. This would be the category for Trump and includes most of those mentioned plus, for example, Yasser Arafat, Menachim Begin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Frank Kellogg and Austen Chamberlain. Second are those who have committed their lives to the cause of peace: of this more later, but I would remark that in looking through the list I, supposedly a knowledgeable expert on politics and modern history, had heard of only 61 of the individual recipients of the prize, less than half. Third the committee has allowed a category of those who can be said to have removed or reduced the causes of war. These include George Marshall (1953), the only professional soldier to receive the award, for the Marshall Plan and the revival of European economies, the agronomist Earnest Borlaug (1970) for the “green revolution” and the consequent reduction of poverty and Al Gore (2007) for publicising the issues of climate change,
On that third criterion peacefulness opens up like a gulf and blends into general goodness. Obviously this has always posed philosophical problems for the committee, but I don’t think they are ultimately as serious as the problems posed by the peaceniks, those who devote their lives to the cause of peace. My favourite example is the British writer and politician Sir Norman Angell (1872-1967). Angell had a long and fascinating life much of which was devoted to organisations devoted to peacefulness: the Union of Democratic Control, The World Committee Against War and Fascism, the League of Nations Union and the Labour Party (he was an MP 1929-31). In 1910 he wrote The Grand Illusion which argued that global economies were so intertwined that war was impossible. Of course, given what happened, and what has continued to happen, it wasn’t impossible and what he really meant was that it was impossible if we were rational. To which the obvious riposte is that “we” don’t exist – there is no enlightened collective in the real world and in that real world saying that you would never hit anyone and that you have studiously avoided learning any means of self defence may be the best way of getting yourself thumped.
Sadly Norway itself provides one of the best examples of the illusions of peace. The government of the Norwegian Labour Party under Johan Nygaardsvold was elected in 1935 and enacted a number of social reforms which were to define Norwegian social democracy including pensions and national insurance. They believed in strict neutrality, the League of Nations and the peaceful resolution of disputes. They did not re-arm when others did. In short they behaved like peaceloving candidates for their own prize. But their virtues were only virtues in a hypothetical world – in the real one their strategic importance was such that they were so weak militarily that they were overrun by the Third Reich in two months from April to early June 1940. Neutrality counted for nothing. Oslo was easily seized by a mere 1500 German troops. And it might have been very different: Norwegian culture, resources and terrain might have provided a serious challenge to the invaders if the Norwegians had re-armed and formed alliances. If they had lasted until the winter they would have been in their element and might have proved as problematic to the Germans as the Finns did to the Russians in the Winter War of the same period. In Britain we might hypothetically bear in mind that George Lansbury, Michael Foot and Jeremy Corbyn were all more or less pacifists who led the Labour Party but never became prime minister perhaps because enough people just didn’t buy pacifism.
The Peace Prize has come to be seen as a sort of secular sainthood and in that context it is very interesting and slightly surprising to note that Donald Trump et. al. would want one because at time (especially when awarded to a peacenik it all seems rather “woke”. But there are many philosophical problems in awarding it and the most obvious one is that peacefulness doesn’t necessarily help the cause of peace. Considered in that light the Roosevelts and Trumps might sometimes be the real agents of peace.
Lincoln Allison November 2025
(An edited version of this article was published by The Daily Telegraph in December 2025.)