Nobel Peace Prize
=================

The Nobel Peace Prize appears in John Kiriakou's story twice over, once as an honor he was himself nominated for, and repeatedly as the explanatory key he applies to presidents.

Kiriakou's nomination

In 2016, a Swedish parliamentarian nominated Kiriakou for the Nobel Peace Prize, one of the signs, alongside a West Point invitation to lecture the freshman class on ethics in intelligence operations, that opinion had come around after prison.

Obama's prize

Kiriakou stood in the snow for two hours to vote for Barack Obama and "really believed... he deserved that Nobel Peace Prize." The belief didn't survive the record: Obama adopted most of Bush's counterterrorism policies, he says, while Americans "just bought it" because a Peace Prize winner was doing it. His later formulation is flat: "He didn't deserve one, but they gave him one."

Trump's obsession

Kiriakou reads much of Donald Trump's foreign policy through a single motive. "I have a friend at the White House who told me to never underestimate Donald Trump's desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize. He's still angry that Barack Obama has a Nobel Peace Prize." Hence the North Korea talks, the Iran overtures, the promise to end the Ukraine war in a day. The endgame he sketches: expand the Abraham Accords, bring in the Saudis, declare victory, "and get your Nobel Peace Prize." When Thailand and Cambodia announced a ceasefire after Trump's weekend phone calls, Kiriakou's explanation was the same: "I think he wants the Nobel Peace Prize." Netanyahu's nomination of Trump for the prize he described with a term he declined to define on air: "circle jerk is the best way to say it, actually."

Nixon to China, or Grover Cleveland

Explaining why Trump pressed for a Gaza deal, Kiriakou lists the prize alongside base politics. MAGA is against foreign wars "and we're in this war up to our necks"; and "Donald Trump is obsessed with winning the Nobel Peace Prize. If he can bring peace even indirectly to Gaza with a deal that's acceptable to the Gazans, maybe that gives him a chance."

He puts the ambition as a fork in the historical record. Trump "can go down in history as just like Richard Nixon did when he went to China, as this cutting-edge leader in foreign policy. Or he can go down as Grover Cleveland, who was president in the late 19th century, served two non-consecutive terms, and nobody remembers who in the world he is. He wants to be the former."

The same logic produces a prediction about Iran that Kiriakou concedes sounds unhinged: just as Nixon was the only president who could make peace with China in 1972, "maybe Trump is the only one who can go to Iran", not literally, but to Riyadh, at Mohammed bin Salman's invitation, to meet President Pezeshkian. "Stranger things have happened through history."

Why he will not walk away from Ukraine

Asked why Donald Trump does not simply end American involvement in Ukraine, Kiriakou gave three reasons and put the prize third and decisive. It would make him look weak, "he would go down in history as the president who lost Ukraine." He is the grand dealmaker. "And there's a third reason, and we all know what it is. He desperately wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize."

Kiriakou enumerates the deals already banked toward it, India and Pakistan, Congo and Rwanda, Thailand and Cambodia, and says a Russian,Ukrainian settlement is the one Trump believes would make him competitive. He adds the grievance he thinks drives it: "he's furious that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize without deserving it."

See also

- Barack Obama
- Donald Trump
- Abraham Accords
