Has the Nobel Peace Prize outlived its usefulness?

Speaking of the Nobel Peace Prize, you have to wonder these days whether it is still relevant and legitimate, least of all useful. No less a personage than Lloyd Axworthy, Canadian one-time Peace Prize nominee, echoes my own sentiments.

The Nobel Peace Prize was inaugurated by Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, back in 1895, partly to assuage his own guilt at bringing such a destructive power into the world, and at the fortune he had amassed from the sale of armaments. So, you could say that the Prize was tainted from the get-go. But it was undeniably a worthy endeavour, with its mandate to honour those who have done the most to advance fraternity among nations, reduce standing armies, and promote peace through cooperation and dialogue.

There have been some very laudable winners over the decades, including Nelson Mandela, Liu Xiaobo, Dalai Lama, Andrei Sakharov, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Elie Wiesel, as well as a bunch of very worthy organizations like the International Peace Bureau, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces, etc.

However, the Prize has also seen its share of controversial recipients: Henry Kissinger in 1973, in the midst of America's war in Vietnam; Yasser Arafat in 1994, despite his deeply ambiguous legacy of violence; Abiy Ahmed in 2019, who then plunged Ethiopia into a very nasty civil war just a year later; even Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991, who seemed thoroughly deserving at the time, but whose brutal crackdown on the Myanmar's Rohingya minority decades later has drawn international condemnation. And now we have María Corina Machado, despite her support for sanctions and military intervention.

Several US Presidents have earned the accolade - Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama - some more deserving than others. There was a lot of debate about Obama's award, so early in his tenure, before he had achieved much of anything. And now, of course, Donald Trump is trying to lie, buy, bluster and batter his way into the annals. Nobel Laureate Machado has vowed to share her Prize with him, and the leaders of many other countries have promised to nominate him if he will only cut their countries some slack on trade. Under Trump, the Prize has become distinctly transactional.

Each year, when the Nobel Peace Prize nominees and winners are announced, it is met with more and more skepticism. It is hard for the Nobel Committee not to get caught up in global politics to some extent, and global politics is becoming increasingly messy, cynical and noxious. Has the Nobel Peace Prize lost its meaning, then, in a world where law, dialogue, morality and good-faith negotiations hold less and less sway?

Well, as the pragmatic Mr. Axworthy puts it: "Peacemaking has always been a grubby, imperfect business, conducted amid moral compromises and by flawed actors. To discard the ideal because its execution is imperfect would be to surrender entirely to the law of the jungle." Just so.