On Monday January 19, 2026, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre confirmed that US President Donald Trump had written to him over the weekend linking his hostile moves towards Greenland to his not having been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The letter was anything but ambiguous and went straight to the point:

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace…” He went on to say that just because Denmark landed a boat there hundreds of years ago, it does not make it theirs: “There are no written documents, it’s only that, but we had boats landing there, also."

The letter comes in the wake of a saga that is becoming more ridiculous by the day. As long as we continue to treat Trump’s megalomania and tantrums as acceptable behaviour, we are putting the security of the planet in ever greater risk. Enough is enough.

An ignoble debacle

On October 10, 2025, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Venezuela opposition leader Maria Corina Machado.

After vilifying the Venezuelan regime with as much vitriol as it could muster, the committee’s press release went on to justify its disconcerting choice:

“Maria Corina Machado meets all three criteria stated in Alfred Nobel’s will for the selection of a Peace Prize laureate.

She has brought her country’s opposition together. She has never wavered in resisting the militarisation of Venezuelan society. She has been steadfast in her support for a peaceful transition to democracy.”

This is not only far from the truth; it is also an insult to those who have genuinely been working tirelessly and at great personal risk for peace.

People like Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Palestine, who was sanctioned by the US on July 9, 2025 for her relentless work in combatting a genocide, or Greta Thunberg who was arrested twice in 2025 for the same reason; to say nothing of the medical teams and journalists of Gaza, many of whom lost their lives resisting the most ruthless of persecutions.

Machado’s choice was clearly rooted in the committee’s desire to ingratiate itself with President Trump. The Trump administration is not averse to bullying and bribing in order to get its way, but succumbing to such pressures by awarding the Peace Prize to Trump would have been too outrageous, even by the Nobel Committee’s own dubious standards.

So it opted for someone who it thought, given Trump’s sabre-rattling against Venezuela, and Machado’s cosying up to the US President, would have placated his obsession for the coveted prize, especially seeing as it was US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who nominated Machado for the peace prize in the first place.

They couldn’t have been more mistaken. Trump’s deep-rooted narcissism is not that easily placated, with his sulking reaching such a pitch that after his attack on Venezuela and abduction of its president, Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, he dismissed Machado as a possible successor claiming: “She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.”

Needless to say, mainstream media feted Machado unquestioningly, gladly promoting the glowing narrative. Thankfully, independent journalism still exists, if one knows where to look for it, and a very different take was adopted by WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. He went further than just highlighting the betrayal and in December 17, 2025 he filed a criminal complaint in Sweden accusing the Nobel Foundation of committing serious crimes, including the facilitation of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He highlighted the fact that the decision to award the prize to Machado directly contravened Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will, which states that the recipient of the Peace Prize should have “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” and “the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Furthermore, Assange added that:

“Any disbursement contradicting this mandate constitutes misappropriation from the endowment. The pending transfer of 11 million SEK ($1.18 million USD) and existing 10 December 2025 handover of the prize medal to María Corina Machado, in violation of this disbursement restriction, appear to be acts of serious criminality.

The criminal complaint details Machado’s ineligibility by listing (and referencing) instances of her bellicose rhetoric, which includes statements like: “Military escalation may be the only way. . . the United States may need to intervene directly…” and “The only path left is the use of force.”

She even referred to the strikes on civilian boats, which killed scores of people, including survivors, as “visionary”! As for her stance on the genocide in Gaza, in a call to Benjamin Netanyahu on October 17, 2025, she commended him for his decisions and resolute actions in the course of the war.

The complaint also emphasised the fact that: “Using her elevated position as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Machado may well have tipped the balance in favour of war.” Concerns that were amply justified by the events that occurred on January 3, 2026, during Operation Absolute Resolve, which resulted in the abduction of Maduro, and Trump stating that he would “run” Venezuela himself. It will be interesting to see the outcome of the criminal complaint, but, sadly, it is unlikely that we will witness robust action against those involved in the decision to award the Peace Prize to Machado.

Insult to injury

As for Machado’s actions following the award, on October 11, 2025 she dedicated the Peace Prize to genocide-facilitator and warmonger Donald Trump. Moreover, seeing as that was not enough to win his full support, she went a step further and did something shocking by any standards: on January 15, she gave her Nobel Peace Prize medal to President Trump as “as a recognition for his unique commitment to our freedom.”

This mirrored the conduct of Norwegian fascist author Knut Hamsun, who, in 1943, gave his Nobel Prize for Literature to Hitler’s propaganda chief, and war criminal, Joseph Goebbels.

Needless to say, Trump accepted the second-hand Peace Prize greedily, without the slightest bit of shame, with the same air of entitlement as the schoolyard bully stealing his victim’s lunchbox. All the Nobel Committee could do at that point is publish a statement the following day, distancing itself from Machado’s decision and clarifying its own position, stressing that:

“A laureate cannot share the prize with others, nor transfer it once it has been announced. A Nobel Peace Prize can also never be revoked… The Committee does not comment on laureates’ subsequent statements, decisions, or actions. Any ongoing assessments or choices made by laureates must be understood as their own responsibility.”

Whether Machado’s gamble pays off, resulting in her being installed as Trump’s lackey in Venezuela, is still to be seen, although for the time being, Trump seems comfortable enough with the free reign Maduro’s existing framework is providing him. Afterall, the current government has more reason to fear him and therefore they can be more easily controlled, whereas a legitimately elected President, be it Machado or anybody else, will undermine Trump’s primary aim of despoiling Venezuela of its oil.

The dangers of bootlicking

It is a well-known fact that giving in to the school bully or to despots like Hitler, Putin or Trump, never works; and yet Trump’s second term has been marked by kowtowing and grovelling from all sorts of quarters, from heads of state to so-called neutral bodies like FIFA, the Nobel Committee and, who knows, perhaps even the cardinals at the last conclave who elected a conservative American as pope.

He takes over the Gaza strip, as killings of Palestinians continue, and they call it a Peace Plan, he abducts the President of a sovereign state and declares that he will rule the country and they look away; he stabs Ukraine in the back and they still reach out to him; he threatens to take Greenland “whether they like it or not” and they bend over backwards to try to make him see reason. It is said that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" and yet those in a position to challenge him still opt for trying to appease him with flattery and concessions. Insanity, indeed! What is needed is for Trump to be called out for the maniac that he is.

You cannot play by the diplomatic playbook with someone who delights in tearing it into shreds. Enough royal banquets, million-dollar gifts and phoney awards. He needs to be ostracised; treated for the shameful creature he is. Yes, he is dangerous, and he will go on the offensive, as he has vindictively done with Greenland, but that may be the step too far needed for his cronies to realise that President Trump is an embarrassment and a liability. If America is not prepared to put this loose cannon in its place, it is about time the rest of the world does.