If you are anything like me, the name of the person who won this year’s Nobel peace prize will not come automatically in your head. And no, it is not because it is difficult to pronounce. María Corina Machado is after all not that difficult to say. Not as easy as Donald Trump, but it slips easily off the tongue. Probably it is because it’s a name that you have not heard before – at least in this part of the world – and most likely, you will not hear again.

This has made me wonder how the Norwegian committee makes its decision in giving the award. The criteria apparently are not that extensive. According to Alfred Nobel’s will, the Peace Prize is awarded to the person who in the preceding year “shall have done 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”.

Donald Trump’s candidacy, despite the rightful credit to the Gaza peace process, did not fulfill the time criteria, as the committee was looking at events that took place in 2024. Even then, however, looking at the other first two criteria, the odds are not in favour of the US president.

Working for the fraternity of nations is something that Trump has actively worked against. The slogan ‘America First’ puts the notion of fraternity of nations to bed. The advocacy of making Canada the 51st US state, the threat of expropriating Greenland, the tariff war unleashed on the world, among others, are active examples that go beyond a mere slogan. The Gaza peace process has rightly taken the limelight on world news, but the recent flare up of tensions in the trade war between China and the US is a cause of great concern. It was rich of US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to say that China was trying to hurt the world’s economy, after Beijing imposed sweeping export controls on rare earths and critical minerals, hitting global supply chains. Somehow, who initiated the trade war was lost on Bessent.

As for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, the less said the better. Defence budgets among most nations have more than doubled and the renaming of the Department of Defence to Department of War in the US indicates exactly where Trump’s priorities lie.

This leaves the third criterion, “the holding and promotion of peace congresses”, as the only real candidate for fulfilling Trump’s dream of winning the prize. The Trump peace plan for Gaza is the only genuine piece of good news that we have seen the past few months. Even though the risks of failing to go through the 20 steps in the process are becoming more evident by the day, the truth remains that unless Trump had exerted pressure on all parties to come together, we would not be giving peace a chance today.

This came about after Trump took the advice of his advisors and reversed course on his initial plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza. Israel’s bombing of Hamas targets in Qatar also helped to focus the president’s mind on the risks of an expanded Middle East conflict. Qatar was so upset that it demanded, and got, US military guarantees against any third party strikes in the future. That is a shrewd payback in gifting that plane to Trump. Whatever caused the president to change his mind is impossible to know. That the motivation to win the Nobel peace prize might have played a role in his thinking will remain hidden.

What is certain though is that the president is not leaving things to chance for next year. I was surprised to see the nauseating parade of world leaders attending the Cairo summit for the Gaza plan, as I could not see what the point of it was. Surely it was not simply a spectacle to publicly praise Trump, an event that no country leader – our own Christodoulides included – could miss, for fear of missing out. On reading the third Nobel peace criterion it all became clear. For according to my AI assistant, “a peace congress means a formal gathering where leaders, diplomats, or activists meet to discuss ways to maintain or restore peace – often through negotiation, treaties, or international cooperation.” And there you have it, a real-life congress to rubber stamp Trump’s claim for the peace prize.

This brought another thing to mind. In economics there is the idea called Goodhart’s law, first articulated by British economist Charles Goodhart in 1975. It says that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, that is, when you start rewarding or punishing someone based on a specific metric, people optimise for the metric rather than the thing it’s supposed to represent. The result? The metric gets distorted – it no longer reliably indicates true performance.

Related to the above is what the award is supposed to be for. Is it supposed to be an incentive for future performance or a reward for past good behavior? For Trump the answer is given in the following quote taken from his chat on the Todd Starnes show on August 21. “If you are not a believer, and you believe you go nowhere, what’s the reason to be good really? There has to be some kind of a, a report card up there somewhere.” That sums up Trump’s motivation of being good. There must be something in it for him. Otherwise, there is no point in being good. His new motivation, now that he is getting older, is getting into heaven, something he has said on a few occasions.

The reason for being good has been explored in more detail, by moral philosopher Iris Murdoch, one of my favorite authors. Her idea of goodness resists the behaviourist or utilitarian focus on external acts and consequences. Instead, Murdoch recentres moral philosophy on inner vision, attention and the reality of the Good as a transcendent moral ideal. She describes moral progress as a process of “unselfing” – a discipline of overcoming our natural tendency to project our desires and anxieties onto others. This lack of promoting the self is perhaps why we all fail to recognise the name of María Corina Machado.

What exactly am I getting at, you may ask? It is really a long-winded argument to say that if Trump manages to maintain the peace in the Middle East and initiates an end to the Ukrainian-Russia war he should be awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2026. I will even cheer for him to get it. That does not mean to say that he truly deserves it, or that he will end up in heaven…