The Price of Peace - and of Anger: How Donald Trump Became a Footnote of History in Oslo

It was to be expected - and yet again a spectacle for the history books. While in Oslo the cameras were focused on a 58-year-old Venezuelan woman receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for her unwavering commitment to democracy and human rights, a man in Washington sat believing himself to be the rightful laureate. Donald Trump, who since the beginning of his second term has tirelessly insisted that he deserves the Nobel Prize for ending "seven unendable wars," came away empty-handed. Instead, the Norwegian Committee honored María Corina Machado - a woman who relies not on tanks, drones, or diplomatic photo ops, but on courage. For Trump, who locates his own peace mission somewhere between Israel, Iran, Cambodia, and Kazakhstan, it is an affront to his self-perception.

For months, the president has been touring Fox Studios and Truth Social channels with the conviction that the world owes him only one prize - and the right one at that. That the Nobel jury had already made its decision days before his latest ceasefire tweet will likely be seen in Washington as a conspiracy. In Trump's world there are no lost votes, only "stolen" ones. Norway's Socialist leader Kirsti Bergstø put it plainly: one must be "prepared for anything" the president might do next. Trump, said Bergstø, is taking the United States "in a direction that is hostile to freedom, authoritarian, and dangerous." That the Peace Prize goes to a woman fighting for democracy under an oppressive regime while Trump himself attacks courts, the press, and the opposition is an irony the Nobel Committee has rarely staged more clearly.

Meanwhile, in Stockholm came the second blow. Hans Ellegren, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, publicly warned that Trump is "destroying the scientific foundation of the United States." No other country has produced more Nobel laureates - and hardly any has squandered its reputation so quickly. Billions in funding cuts, dismissals in research institutions, political purges at universities: the former land of ideas now produces more enemies than insights. "In the postwar period, the United States took over the role of Germany as the world's leading scientific nation," said Ellegren. "If they now begin to strangle their own research, they will lose that position." Remarkably clear words from a body that usually speaks only on the molecular level, not the political.

Trump, who has turned peace into a show and science into an enemy, is now experiencing a double defeat: the world is honoring those who defend democracy while he fights against it. María Corina Machado did not win the Nobel Peace Prize because she is perfect, but because she understood that peace is not a marketing promise. For Trump, that is an affront. For the rest of the world, it is a rare moment in which reason prevails.