Sorry, Donald, but there is no Nobel Peace Prize for appeasement

The craven plan being cynically cooked up by Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterpart to carve up Ukraine is no peace deal, writes Sean O’Grady. The Nobel committee shouldn’t even dream of tapping up Trump until Putin has been safely delivered to The Hague to answer for war crimes

So welcome, then, to the 28-point Witkoff-Dmitriev plan: the most cynical plot to carve up a smaller independent state since the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact sealed the fate of Poland back in August 1939.

For the West – if such a term can still be used in the time of Trump – it represents a betrayal, not only of the people of Ukraine, but of Europe, and the international order, and the Atlantic Alliance that has kept the peace in this part of the world for eight decades. The vicious irony, of course, is that, just like that earlier treaty signed between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, it will not preserve the peace in Europe for very long, and it will not satisfy the imperial ambitions of the participant common to both exercises in expansionism – Russia.

That should be reason enough to reject it. The Witkoff-Dmitriev plan was, like its inglorious predecessor, negotiated in secret, because even tyrants can be embarrassed. The Ukrainians and the Europeans have had no role in it, and they won’t, other than being asked to sign up to it at some ceremony in a gilded hall in the Kremlin or the White House (which are also converging in their Rococo style).

The “security guarantees” being offered to Ukraine are worthless. It is about to be dismembered, and practically disarmed. The Russians get the whole of the Donbas without even fighting for it, and the Americans the lucrative mineral rights “negotiated” (ie coerced from a desperate President Zelensky) in a previous deal, even though the idea there was that the Americans would not abandon them to Russian occupation.

The new proposed border between Ukraine and Russia (which America has promised to fully recognise) will leave Putin with a fine strategic advantage for his next, inevitable, attempt to take the whole country and absorb it into Russia. It’s peace, of sorts, but it’s temporary at best.

US president Donald Trump greets Russian president Vladimir Putin on the tarmac after their arrival at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, in August (AFP/Getty)

Putin’s motives have always been obvious. The conquest of Ukraine and the restoration of Russian power are the strategic aims, and diplomacy and armed force are alternated as tactically required. He can play Trump like a fiddle when needed. His military may be incompetent and his diplomats equally so, and he has been taking huge risks with his economy, but Putin has been cunning enough to create the impression of a superpower inevitably grinding its way to victory.

Trump, always inclined to do business with a “strongman”, has been duped, which is no excuse, but his abject failure to pursue long-term American interests stems from another, even worse weakness: pure, gold-plated, diamond-encrusted vanity. We are talking, of course, about the Nobel Peace Prize won by a number of his predecessors, notably Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter and Teddy Roosevelt. How much does Trump want to join that exclusive club.

We needn’t be churlish. Although flawed, Trump’s plan for peace in Gaza has been adopted by the United Nations and deserves a chance. How many of the other seven or eight wars he claims to have “ended” have actually been resolved is another matter (and Gaza is far from “over”, though his efforts in Africa and Asia ought not be sneered at).

Trump’s vanity has allowed him to be duped by the Russian president (PA Wire)

The issue with the Witkoff-Dmitriev plan (named after the presidents’ businessmen envoys) is that to give Trump the Nobel Peace Prize for that “peace plan” would in fact be to reward unprovoked war. As one former US diplomat has remarked, they don’t give peace prizes for appeasement. Otherwise, to hark back to the past again, it would be Neville Chamberlain, not Winston Churchill, who’d be revered the world over (including having a bust in the Oval Office, though the current president may not entirely realise the lesson from history that symbolises).

So that – apart from many other reasons to do with Trump’s destabilisation of the global rules-based order, and his indifference to war crimes in Gaza – is the reason why the Nobel committee cannot, in all conscience, give the US president an award. To do so would create a perverse incentive for dictators and their friends the world over to start, or acquiesce in, illegal wars that end with an unequal, unjust, unstable peace.

To return to the historical analogy, the current judges in Oslo would never have contemplated awarding the prize jointly to Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, let alone Stalin or Hitler, for invading and then dividing up Poland and declaring it “peace”, complete with “non-aggression” clauses that were supposed to guarantee security and stability in Eastern Europe. The Nobel Prize committee weren’t fooled then, and they should not be fooled now.

Whatever the subjugation of Ukraine might be called, it is not “peace” in any honourable sense of the term. Peace is what existed before Putin invaded, before his soldiers kidnapped 20,000 children, and his bombs murdered civilians by the thousand, and his troops committed atrocities on his behalf.

Unless, and until, the Americans pressure Putin to get the hell out of Ukraine, and then deliver the dictator to a war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Trump should not even dream of getting any kind of diplomatic prize. The Nobel committee should stand up to him. Even if he threatens to bomb Norway.