The fuss about the Nobel Peace Prize has always been excessively outsized to its relevance. Like most prizes, the panel is bound to have its treasure trove of prejudices and eccentricities in reaching any decision. Thin resumes have swayed the Norwegian committee to acts of dottiness. Surprising moments of dark humour have made an appearance in the award of the prize to warmongers and those antithetical to peace. And those on the Nobel Prize peace panel would barely cause a murmur of acknowledgement outside the spine-like length of that country of only 5.6 million inhabitants. (The current membership of five features, for instance, three politicians: Anne Enger, former leader of the country’s Centre Party; former Conservative Party education minister Kristin Clement, and former state secretary of the Labour Party, Gry Larsen.)
Rather feebly, Asle Toje, another member of the five, uses a gastronomic metaphor in describing the selection process: “We do it pretty much the same way you make a good sauce – you reduce and reduce and reduce.” The reduction formula leads to surprising, rancid results. In 1973, the ruthless, toadying poseur Henry Kissinger was overcome with joy in receiving the prize. The National Security Adviser and US Secretary of State had supposedly done much to advance the cause of peace in the Indochina conflict by “spearheading cease-fire negotiations” that led to an armistice in January 1973. His co-awardee, the North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho, was far more sensible, refusing to accept a peace award where there was no peace to be had.
The choice of Kissinger was almost mockingly ghoulish. This was the same man who left his marks all over secret and illegal bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia during the Nixon administration, oversaw the extinction of democratically elected governments in Latin America in favour of murderous, authoritarian regimes, and spent his early academic career arguing that small-scale nuclear might be feasibly pursued by the United States as a psychological lever.
The selection for 2025 was always going to be shadowed by the theatre known as the Donald Trump show. In claiming not to want it, the US President has done much to pad out his credentials to make himself eligible. He has put on an incomplete, disputable show of halting conflicts while indulging in spells of violence (strikes on Venezuelan shipping, ostensibly carrying drugs to the US; the illegal bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities).
What the committee has done is the next best (or worse) thing. In opting for María Corina Machado, seen as the main figure of the Venezuelan opposition to the current government of Nicolás Maduro, they have offered the prize to a Trump medium. “I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support in our cause,” she cooed on X.
Almost hinting at something in the works – that is to say, the ongoing regime change agenda so enthusiastically sought by Washington – Machado was convinced of being “on the threshold of victory and today, more than ever, we count on President Trump, the people of the United States, the peoples of Latin America, and the democratic nations of the world as our principal allies to achieve freedom and democracy.” Given Latin America’s record on peaceful transitions from coups, this was fine humour indeed.
The award to Machado was, according to the Nordic wiseacres, based on 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.” They go on to be didactic, talking about democracy being in global retreat, with Machado being its illuminating defender. (On being barred from running, she installed the surrogate opposition leader Edmundo González who allegedly won the July 2024 election.)
This is the bromide of binary thought. Machado’s record, befitting most political records, is untidy. David Smilde, a student of Venezuelan politics, sees her as “a controversial pick, less a peace activist than a political operator willing to use some of the trade’s dark arts for the greater democratic good.” Even that might be generous.
For one thing, she is clearly biding her time, shunning local and regional elections, treating the honouring of the 2024 presidential election results as absolute. She has openly argued for the necessity of foreign intervention in removing Maduro and endorsed Trump’s military buildup in the Caribbean, calling the recent bombing of suspected drug boats a matter of “saving lives”. To remove Maduro was essential, she argues, because of his alleged credentials as “the head of a narco-terrorist structure of cooperation.”
Disingenuously, she has swallowed the dubious theory that Maduro is the true figure running the Tren de Aragua gang, which Trump accuses of directing operations against the United States. Her Vente Venezuela party has enthusiastically shared the threats by US officials against supposed Venezuelan drug traffickers on X. “If you’re in the Caribbean,” states one recent post, “if you’re north of Venezuela and you’re trying to traffic drugs to the US, you’re a legitimate target for the US.”
Machado is undoubtedly readying herself to step into any presidential vacancy, forced or otherwise. She claims to have a plan for the first 100 hours and the first 100 days of a transition process, promising the generation of wealth for the country to the value of $1.7 trillion over 15 years. Her advisor on international affairs, Pedro Urruchurtu, has been open about communicating with the Trump administration over Maduro’s removal.
Again, this says much about the eccentric reading of peace embraced by the insular Norwegian grandees. If Tom Lehrer was right to call political satire obsolete after Kissinger’s award, it would also be accurate to say that instances of rich farce have come in its wake.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
