Donald Trump nominated for Nobel Peace Prize after Israel-UAE peace accord

US President Donald Trump has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize over the deal his administration brokered between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.The nomination was submitted by Norwegian politician Christian Tybring-Gjedde, who leads the country’s right-leaning Progress Party.
“For his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees,” Mr Tybring-Gjedde told Fox News, explaining his decision to put Mr Trump’s name forward.
He also mentioned the President’s attempts to reach a denuclearisation deal with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, and praised his decision to withdraw a large number of US troops from the Middle East.
“I’m not a big Trump supporter,” Mr Tybring-Gjedde stressed.
“The committee should look at the facts and judge him on the facts, not the way he behaves sometimes. The people who have received the Peace Prize in recent years have done much less than Donald Trump.
“For example, Barack Obama did nothing.”
He also nominated Mr Trump for the prize in 2018, citing his Singapore summit with Kim.
That year, it was won by Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”.
The deal between Israel and the UAE was announced at the White House last month after 18 months of negotiations.
Israel agreed to halt its plans to annex parts of the Palestinian West Bank in exchange for a normalisation of relations with the Gulf state.
Mr Trump is planning to host a signing ceremony on September 15, which will be attended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the UAE’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Foreign Policy magazine described the deal as a “historic achievement” and Mr Trump’s “first unambiguous diplomatic success”.
“It’s a genuine historic accomplishment that is unambiguously good for the United States,” it wrote last month.
“It will bolster Israel’s security and wellbeing, a longstanding vital interest of the United States.
“It will contribute to peace and stability in the Middle East, not only by indefinitely forestalling a potentially destabilising unilateral assertion of Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank, but by giving the UAE and other modernising Gulf states full access to the region’s dominant military and intelligence power, and to its most technologically advanced economy.
“It will worry, isolate and enhance deterrence against Iran, the United States’ most dangerous regional adversary.
“And it reaffirms Washington’s still-unrivalled ability to serve as a force for good in alleviating some of the world’s most intractable conflicts. Neither China nor Russia, nor Europe nor the United Nations could have played the same role of peacemaker.”
Even Mr Trump’s election opponent, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, welcomed the deal as a “historic step” that would help ease tensions in the region – though he stopped short of praising or even mentioning the President personally.
“The UAE’s offer to publicly recognise the state of Israel is a welcome, brave and badly needed act of statesmanship,” Mr Biden said when it was announced.
More to come.