No, Trump doesn't deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for North Korea negotiations

Hirak Mukhopadhyay is a student at the University of Delaware, the former president of the UD College Democrats and the former vice president of the UD chapter of the NAACP. 

The final weekend in April gave the world hope that North Korea and South Korea could be at peace. However, similar attempts of such an agreement in the past have not worked out in the long term.

While President Donald Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by House Republicans, his role in all of this is dubious at best. Ironically, Trump has withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal, whose architects are far more successful.

Some of Trump’s supporters are acting as if this is like Camp David; such praise is improper. 

Let the record show that both Koreas did meet in jovial fashion. No one should root against the Koreas making peace. The agreement which was signed to end the war between the two countries and the mutual agreement to denuclearize are solid starts.

The Panmunjom Document needs to be concise and effective. But it is not time to pull out the cognac just yet. To officially end this war, China and the United States have to sign on.

It remains to be seen how Trump will do in these talks. The DPRK state media has already downplayed denuclearization. North Korea has never been more dangerous than it is now domestically, while also having its sophisticated nuclear technology.

Kim may lie and put up a facade to reduce sanctions. There was diplomatic contact and South Korean aid gifted from 1998 to 2008. There were two summits for the Koreas in 2000 and 2007, with the former also vowing to end the Korean War.

No real change came about, and North Korea is not the sole reason either. Lo and behold, North Korea is already threatening to pull out of the talks. 

No one in South Korea should now be convinced that Donald Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for this, let alone their president. Donald Trump has tweeted threats at Kim Jong Un, implied his nuclear button is bigger, implied Kim was overweight, and called him “little rocket man.” Kim Jong Un then called him a “dotard.” 

Talk about weird diplomacy. 

If anyone deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, it should be the individuals involved with the Iran nuclear deal, or the JCPOA. Both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu just recently declared that the JCPOA is not working and Iran is lying.

Funny, since much of their evidence consists of Iran’s past-but-unrelated nuclear indiscretions. Such rhetoric actually validates the Iran deal’s necessity.

The International Atomic Energy Agency of the United Nations, Israeli intelligence, and the Pentagon have all concluded that Iran has been following the agreement so far. 

The deal is flawed in parts, and former Secretary of State John Kerry has admitted that. But it is the best possible deal that could be reached and is working within its parameters on centrifuge and enrichment reduction, which took thousands of hours of negotiation, the involvement of not only Iran and the United States (their meetings and negotiations are significant alone), but also the approval and contributions from the E.U., Germany, France, China, Russia, and the U.K.

The U.S., China, North Korea, and South Korea have not put in those thousands of hours of negotiations on this Korean War peace agreement yet. The JCPOA members have. 

Republicans in Congress have long been unsupportive of international coalitions and the United Nations, and therefore unmoved by what is otherwise an impressive embedding of the IAEA in the JCPOA. As I recently learned at a University of Delaware philosophy lecture presented by Penn Professor Kok-Chor Tan, the international order is often heavily doubted and distrusted.

But it is the IAEA that has verified that only 3 percent of Iran’s uranium stockpile exists in the present day.

It is important to remember the Camp David Accords, which earned Sadat, Begin, and later Carter (along with humanitarian work after leaving office) the Nobel Peace Prize. That agreement between the United States, Egypt, and Israel, took a long period of constant negotiations between Egypt and Israel, who were also longstanding enemies for three decades.

But here are some important facts to consider. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Kim Jong Un once; Carter, Vance, and Brzezinski met with Begin, Sadat, King Hussein, and King Khalid too many times to count. The United States gave aid and solidified its alliance with both countries in the end. Egypt and Israel became allies, which continues even today. The agreement also had provisions (later abandoned) to end the Palestine question. 

There are no signs yet that the Panmunjom Document packs a punch like the JCPOA or the Camp David Accords. If people think Trump is already deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize, then foreign policy has truly become folly policy.