The Nobel Peace Prize has become an ignoble joke

For those of us who have long been suspicious of the Nobel Peace Prize, there is nothing like the sight of the award committee struggling to rein in one of their former honors. Last year, the committee presented the award to Abiy Ahmed, the Ethiopian prime minister. In the quotation, Ahmed’s laudable efforts “to achieve peace and international cooperation” were particularly highlighted.

That quote may now need to be carefully edited, as Ahmed has declared war on the leaders of the Tigray region and Ethiopia appears to be slipping into a wider conflagration. Last year’s Peace Prize recipient rejected all requests for dialogue and attempts to mitigate the conflict this year. Some critics even argue for ethnic cleansing.

However, in a sense, Mr. Ahmed is in a long and ignoble Nobel tradition. It is not the first time that the commission seems to have supported an unfair. Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded in 1991. She is now an international pariah accused of defending the genocide in Burma. In 1994, the committee awarded the Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat, then arguably the most famous terrorist in the world. It is true that this happened a few years after the first “Intifada”. But after collecting his gong and his Nobel loot (not the only loot Arafat has managed to acquire in his criminal career), he gave it a couple of years before declaring another Intifada. Just having gong does not seem to provoke peaceful instincts. Amazing.

A friendly observer might attribute this to bad luck on the part of the Nobel Committee: excessive anxiety, perhaps even a blind desire to see the best in people. But any reasonable critic should admit that there has been something odd about the award for years. She has become a victim of John O’Sullivan’s law: that all institutions that are not overtly conservative move to the left as the years go by.

In 2009, the famous committee presented the award to Barack Obama, when he had not yet been in office for a year and when he had not yet achieved anything notable. But the Nobel committee seemed to want to congratulate Obama for being just Obama. In the same way that a few years ago almost every award in the world was awarded to Caitlyn (ex Bruce) Jenner, simply for being stunning and brave. If you are a left-wing politician like Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize has become just another one of those gongs you collect in your endless victories around the world.

By contrast, after four years in office, the odds that the politically predictable Nobel Committee, for example, won’t give its prize to Donald Trump, is absolutely zero. Unlike his predecessors, Trump did not start wars in the Middle East or elsewhere. He avoided some and reduced others that he inherited. So, in this last year in office, his administration oversaw an absolutely historic series of normalization agreements between Israel and many of its Arab neighbors. All without a shot being fired.

But the Norwegian committee will presumably not take note of this result. It would go against his very clear and boring political orientation. In 2012, the committee unanimously voted for the Peace Prize to go to the European Union for its contribution to “peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”. Obviously, if an international body should be given credit for all these things, it should be NATO. But the Nobel committee would never dream of awarding the prize to an international body that has actually done the hard work of keeping the peace in Europe.

There may still be a place for the Nobel Peace Prize. But perhaps the commission could consider a couple of potential reforms to the process? The first would be to try to broaden the composition of your commission. Confront some people with different political views.

Preferably people who can find the countries in question on a map. Diane Abbott, who this week revealed in a tweet that she thought Uighur was a place rather than a people, for example, would not be suitable for work. But there are enough people on this planet with a good understanding of geopolitics and the ability to honor a range of people and organizations without regularly handing out the award to mid-career war criminals.

Another tip the commission might consider is simply not to feel pressured to distribute the prize every year. There is no reason to give out a peace prize every year. More than the Turner Prize for art should be awarded each year. Or even never. If exceptional people come after a lifetime of strife, ostentatiously to reject violence and bring lasting peace – as David Trimble did in 1998 – then these people deserve to be honored.

But these people don’t come any more every year than they come every month. The inability to realize this is one of the reasons why the Nobel Prize is once again in the middle of a bloody pickle of his own making.

Douglas Murray is the author of “The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity”