By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Oct 27 2026 (IPS)
Much of the world has been bemused by US President Donald Trump’s expectation of the Nobel Peace Prize. While aggressive towards most of the world, friend and foe alike, he has treated hostile nuclear powers more respectfully.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
One needs more than Orwell to understand why Trump seriously expected the Nobel for 2025 following his bombing spree, let alone this year after resuming his war on Iran for Israel.
Outdoing every previous US president, Trump authorised over 500 bombings of ten countries in the first year of his second term.
Besides attacking Nigeria, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Venezuela, he also threatened Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland with attacks. But Trump is not alone.
Every US president since World War II has committed war crimes, violating the UN Charter and the Geneva Convention. Over 4.5 million died in these wars, which created 38 million refugees in 2001-19 alone!
Trump believes he deserves the Prize. After he won the November 2024 presidential election, he pledged, “We had no wars for years…I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars…
“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.”
Yet, Trump has also promised to build the world’s greatest military to achieve ‘peace through strength’, claiming he will not actually need to use it.
Barack Obama has acknowledged he does not know why he won the prize in the first year of his presidency. He then illegally bombed seven nations – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and Iraq – without UN Security Council approval!
George W. Bush attacked five countries while Trump 2.0 not only ‘re-bombed’ Obama’s seven, but also surpassed him by adding Nigeria, Iran, and Venezuela!
After Biden gave tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel to ‘carpet bomb’ Gaza, Trump surpassed his predecessor’s generosity despite his contempt for him.
New US military strategy
Trump boastfully rebranded the US Defense Department as the Department of War at the start of his second term, to signal a more offensive and aggressive stance.
The latest US National Defense Strategy (NDS) sees NATO allies “strongly positioned to take primary responsibility for Europe’s conventional defense”.
The NDS envisages US control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, echoing Trump’s ‘Donroe doctrine’ for the Western Hemisphere, while claiming to avoid future interventions abroad!
In 2024, worldwide military spending totalled $2.7 trillion, with the US accounting for over a third! US spending then exceeded the aggregate expenditure of the next nine largest spenders, all Washington allies except for China and Russia.
Fortune magazine projects that the new US military spending target of $1.5 trillion will exceed the combined expenditure of the next 35 highest-spending countries!
The new NDS reasserts Trump’s claims that US allies took advantage of earlier Washington administrations to subsidise their own defence.
When Trump demanded, during his first term, that they spend at least 2% of GDP on the military, their responses were largely lukewarm. In 2025, NATO allies agreed with Trump to increase military spending to 5% of GDP!
The NDS asserts its War Department will be key to NATO “even as we calibrate US force posture and activities in the European theater” to focus on US priorities.
While reiterating “Russia will remain a persistent but manageable threat to NATO’s eastern members for the foreseeable future”, it envisages cutting US troops on Ukraine’s borders.
Unsurprisingly, the US’s NATO allies complain that Trump has created a ‘security vacuum’ undermining Europe’s confrontation of Russia.
China U-turn or American tai-chi?
The Biden NDS viewed China as the US’s main adversary. In contrast, Trump’s new NDS sees China as an established power in the Indo-Pacific region that only needs to be discouraged from dominating the US and its allies.
The goal “is not to dominate China; nor is it to strangle or humiliate them… This does not require regime change… Trump seeks a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations with China”!
Unlike Biden’s NDS commitment to “support Taiwan’s asymmetric self-defense”, the new NDS gives no assurances on Taiwan, although Beijing remains committed to reunification, by force if necessary.
Incredibly, it seeks to “open a wider range of military-to-military communications” with counterparts in China. Unsurprisingly, the US has since also eschewed new trade wars with China.
So why does Trump expect the Nobel Peace Prize? He probably sees himself as less belligerent than his predecessors to ‘near peer’ powers such as China and Russia.
Attacking and bombing ‘insignificant’ small non-nuclear powers probably does not matter to him. His attitude towards ‘shithole’ countries is similar.
Likewise, Trump claimed no one died when the US raided Venezuela on 3 January, apparently referring only to US fatalities, although over a hundred Latin Americans were killed!
IPS UN Bureau
