No U.S. Leader Should Get the Nobel Peace Prize

Appeared on Substack February 2, 2026: https://anandanandalingam649613.substack.com/p/no-us-leader-should-get-the-nobel?r=o7w77

No American leader should ever get the Nobel Peace Prize. They are congenital agents of war and global destabilization rather than peace mongers.

The last U.S. leader who got the Peace Prize was President Barak Obama who got it in 2009 for ostensibly “strengthening global diplomacy” but just look at his record. The Obama administration was responsible for destabilizing Libya during 2011 and getting rid of Muammar Gaddafi in August of that year. Subsequently much chaos has ensued from which Libya has yet to recover. Despite the highfaluting and sweeping speeches about democracy and human rights in Cairo no less, Obama was the catalyst for the coup led by General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi that overthrew democratically elected Mohammed Morsi in Egypt in July 2013. The Sisi administration is, by far, one of the most repressive governments in the whole world. For the trifecta, Obama also helped destabilize Syria by supporting different rebel groups at different times leading to mass migration of Syrians into western Europe, and the resulting hard-core right-wing reaction in countries from Germany, France and the United Kingdom against immigrants of all type. Most people, especially the Europeans, were charmed by Barak Obama, but he hardly deserved a Peace Prize. Even he knows it and says it!

Other American Presidents were no better on the world stage when it comes to Peace. Besides Obama, other prominent political leaders from the United States who received the Nobel Prize include Theodore Roosevelt (1906) for “Mediation of the Russo-Japanese War”, Woodrow Wilson (1919) for being a “Founder of the League of Nations”, George C. Marshall (1953) for “The Marshall Plan for European reconstruction”, Henry A. Kissinger (1973) for “Vietnam peace negotiations”, Jimmy Carter (2002) for “Conflict resolution, democracy, and human rights”, and Al Gore (2007) for “Climate change awareness and advocacy”.

Under what definition does the advocacy of climate change awareness become a peace endeavor? One cannot forget that Al Gore was also part of the Clinton administration that bombed Iraq gratuitously and initiated the breakup of Yugoslavia by other than peaceful means. On Carter, one can fully agree that he was a model of what a great statesman should be, especially after leaving the Presidency in 1981. Jimmy Carter was instrumental in mediating the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt signed on 26^th March 1979, but the Nobel Peace Prize Committee only awarded the prize to Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin; it makes sense that this oversight was rectified even with a delay of 20+ years! George Marshall had a mixed record. He was a general involved with several war efforts, some quite ruthless, but was also the architect of the reconstruction of much of Europe, the best measure to ensure peace in a region that had been at war for several decades if not centuries.

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee is frequently in search of some way of signaling a meta level interest in current affairs. Witness the 2025 Peace Prize being awarded to Maria Corina Machado for according to the announcement “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy”. Clearly the Nobel Peace Prize Committee is taking a stand on Venezuela as opposed to so many different countries where there is only a veneer of democracy, including several countries in Europe. The award and the awardee are so compromised that within a month of receiving it, Ms. Machado decided to give it to American President Donald Trump as a transactional gift to install her as the next President of Venezuela! So much for democracy and human rights, let alone peace, that the Peace Prize seems to want to signal. 

Getting back to my central point, just look at the American leaders who received the Nobel Peace Prize. With the exception of perhaps George Marshall, the others had truly tainted history where the last thing they could be accused of is being paragons of peace or human rights.

Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most globally adventurous of all Presidents that America has seen, and not necessarily in seeking peace. He was Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President McKinley. As Secretary of the Navy, John Long, was quite ill, Roosevelt had the run of the agency. Roosevelt’s expansionist views got a fillip when the armored cruiser USS Maine exploded in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, on February 15, 1898, the killing hundreds of crew members. Spain was blamed. Although President McKinley sought a diplomatic solution, Roosevelt sent out orders to several naval vessels to prepare for war without prior approval. The ensuing attack on Spanish ships and the victory at the Battle of Manila Bay led to McKinley and Congress declaring war on Spain and starting the Spanish–American War. The spoils of winning the Spanish-American war were the invasion of Philippines and its colonization in 1900. Not inclined to sit in Washington DC and manage the naval warfare, Roosevelt resigned and formed the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment (called the “Rough Riders”) determined to see battle. The Rough Riders helped secure Cuba as a U.S. protectorate.

The need to thrust American power globally and be successful in it was one of Roosevelt’s legacies. He helped the McKinley government go to war against Japan and annex Hawaii in 1898. After becoming President, Roosevelt helped put down the Boxer Rebellion in 1901 and followed it up by the execution of several hundred Chinese government officials who supported the uprising against western encroachment of the country. The U.S. joined Germany, Britain and Italy to blockade Venezuela in December 1902 to extract financial gains and access to natural resources. Decided to take over Panama and start the process of making it into a proto-colonial state of the U.S.A. Theodore Roosevelt’s masculinity was celebrated in his day and for several decades after.  He is considered one of the top five Presidents and has his likeness carved into Mount Rushmore. Peacenik, he was not!

Woodrow Wilson was one of the most racist Presidents in U.S. History. For starters, when he was President of Princeton (1902-1910) Wilson actively discouraged the admission of African-Americans as students. One of the first acts when Wilson became President of the United States in 1912 was to fire all but two of the seventeen black supervisors in the federal bureaucracy appointed by Taft. Wilson’s administration escalated the discriminatory hiring policies and segregation of government offices that had begun under Theodore Roosevelt and continued under Taft. By the end of 1913, many departments, including the Navy, Treasury, and Post Office, had segregated workspaces, restrooms, and cafeterias. Many agencies used segregation as a pretext to adopt a whites-only employment policy, claiming they lacked facilities for black workers. In these instances, African-Americans employed prior to the Wilson administration were either offered early retirement, transferred, or simply fired. By the 1910s, African Americans had become effectively shut out of the government and elected office.

While segregation had been present in the Army prior to Wilson, its severity increased significantly under his administration. During Wilson’s first term, the Army and Navy refused to commission new black officers. Black officers already serving experienced increased discrimination and were often forced out or discharged on dubious grounds.  Unlike the Army, the U.S. Navy was never formally segregated. Following Wilson’s appointment of Josephus Daniels as Secretary of the Navy, a system of Jim Crow was swiftly implemented; with ships, training facilities, restrooms, and cafeterias all becoming segregated. In 1919, Black veterans returning home to D.C. were shocked to discover Jim Crow laws had set in; many could not go back to the jobs they held prior to the war or even enter the same building they used to work in due to the color of their skin.

Initially Wilson sought to move away from the foreign policy of his predecessors, which he viewed as imperialistic. He encouraged the Philippines to move towards self-government and independence, and he rejected Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy. Nonetheless, he frequently intervened in Latin America. The 1914 Bryan–Chamorro Treaty converted Nicaragua into a de facto protectorate, and the U.S. stationed soldiers there throughout Wilson’s presidency. The Wilson administration sent troops to occupy the Dominican Republic and intervene in Haiti, and Wilson also authorized military interventions in Cuba, Panama, and Honduras. Between Wilson’s racist policies including the encouragement of Jim Crow laws, and his military adventures in central America and the Caribbean, one could hardly call Wilson worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Henry Kissinger was credited for the reproachment of the U.S. with China and received the Nobel Prize for finalizing the peace treaty with Vietnam. However, he played a key role in destabilizing several countries and thwarting democracy for geopolitical gains of the United States. Kissinger played a key role in bombing the so-called “Ho Chih Minh trail” in Cambodia under the excuse that it was used to supply South Vietnam from North Vietnam. These American bombing campaign in Cambodia, a country that was not Communist at the time and not engaged in a war with the U.S., destabilized the government and contributed to the Khmer Rouge’s ascendance to power. For his role in planning the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, many scholars have stated that Kissinger bears substantial responsibility for the killing of between 50,000 and 150,000 Cambodian civilians. Worse, after Khmer Rouge took over, the killing fields of Kampuchea (Cambodia) were tainted with the blood of millions.

Kissinger also played a significant role in the military taking over in Chile and cementing its power in Brazil and Argentina. In Chile, Kissinger played a key role in the efforts of the United States government to undermine and weaken the socialist government of Salvador Allende who was elected president in 1970 and support the 1973 military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet’s regime murdered opponents including students who were protesting the coup, canceled elections, restricted the media, and suppressed labor unions. Kissinger supported Pinochet helped the U.S. turn away from the atrocities.

In Chile’s neighbor, Argentina, a military junta rose to power in 1976 vowing to combat leftist “subversives.” Kissinger made clear he had no objections to their brutal tactics and repeatedly ignored calls from other State Department officials to raise more concerns about human rights violations. Kissinger had a similar attitude toward other military dictatorships in the region, including in Uruguay and Brazil, and never raised objections to what was known as Operation Condor, a clandestine program that allowed military regimes in that part of the world to illegally pursue, detain, torture and assassinate political dissidents who fled their countries. “I don’t know of any U.S. citizen who is more deplored, more disliked in Latin America than Henry Kissinger,” said Stephen Rabe, a retired University of Texas at Dallas history professor who wrote a book about Kissinger’s relationship with Latin America.

Nixon and Kissinger supported Pakistani dictator Yahya Khan in the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. In the general election of 1970, the Awami League in East Pakistan won an overwhelming majority of seats, 167 out of 253, but the Pakistan military led by Yahya Khan decided to ignore the election results that would give power to the Bengalis. This led to a call for a separate Bangladesh state. The ensuring military action saw hundreds of thousands of Bengalis being killed by the Pakistan military trying to put down the rebellion.  Pakistani soldiers and local pro-Pakistan militias killed between 300,000 and 3,000,000 Bengalis and raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women in a systematic campaign of mass murder and genocidal sexual violence. The U.S. general counsel in East Pakistan, Archer K. Blood wrote hurried telegrams to Washington DC describing the genocide being perpetrated by the Army on the Bangladeshis. Kissinger sneered at people who “bleed” for “the dying Bengalis” and ignored these telegrams. He even reacted by ending Archer Blood’s tenure as United States consul general in East Pakistan and putting him to work in the State Department’s Personnel Office.

Kissinger bears a whole amount of responsibility for these atrocities around the world, Bangladesh, Chile, Argentina Uruguay and Brazil to name a few. We have not even touched on his support of the apartheid regime in South Africa and his complete support of Portuguese colonialism, despite the wave of decolonization and the independence wars which had begun in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. It is quite a joke to have the world celebrate Henry Kissinger as worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. The humorist Tom Lehrer once observed: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.”

The fact of the matter is that the America has been a force against peace, democracy and human rights all over the world for over a century, especially after it became the dominant global economic power. The interest of the United States is to project self-interested geopolitical power around the world, using war or supporting dictators if necessary. Just as a leopard cannot change its spots nor can an American stateman, certainly not a President, become an agent of international peace. Let’s not give a Nobel Peace Prize to such a person!