16.10.2025
Keeping Donald happy
In the name of peace she threatens to bring war. María Machado stands in a long and shameful line. Once again, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded for services rendered to imperialism, writes Eddie Ford
Not for the first time (and almost certainly not for the last), the Nobel Peace Prize has collapsed into self-parody. This year’s winner, María Corina Machado, the Margaret Thatcher-admiring ‘Iron Lady’ and leader of the opposition in Venezuela, has dedicated her prize to that well-known peacenik, Donald J Trump, “for his decisive support of our cause”.
Trump, of course, recently renamed the US Department of Defence as the Department of War - though you could argue that this at least has the virtue of honesty. He called Machado, saying he was “happy” for her, as she “deserved” the accolade. In fact, she, Machado, denies Israel’s Gaza genocide, boasts of her close friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu, and in 2020 her party, Vente Venezuela, actually formalised a pact with Likud “to forge an alliance between our two parties to cooperate on issues related to strategy, geopolitics and security, among others, in order to create an operational partnership”.
Naturally, past social media statements have resurfaced, where she claims that “the struggle of Venezuela is the struggle of Israel” and calls the Zionist state a “genuine ally of freedom”. The ‘peace-loving’ Machado wrote a letter in 2018 to Argentine and Israeli leaders requesting “intervention” to remove Nicholas Maduro from power. As a ‘champion of western civilisation’ she took part, along with Likud, as an “observer member” of Patriots for Europe, in the ‘Make Europe Great Again’ rally in February hosted by Santiago Abascal of Spain’s Vox - it was famously addressed by JD Vance. A festival of ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and the far right.1
In 2023, Machado announced her candidacy for the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election, but she was blocked from running by the ‘socialist’ president, Nicolás Maduro. Therefore she supported the alternative candidacy of Edmundo González. According to the mainstream narrative, the results showed González to be the clear winner, but the Maduro regime declared victory anyway! Under the fraught circumstances of 2024 the truth is impossible to know.
The fact of the matter is that Venezuela has been the target of imperialist plots, sanctions, coup attempts and even a fake ‘parallel’ government over the last 25 years. Initiated by the career military officer, Hugo Chávez, the Bolivarian experiment saw a far-reaching programme of nationalisation, wealth redistribution and popular power at a local level. Venezuela purportedly has the world’s largest reserves of oil. So, when oil prices were high, the country was in receipt of huge revenues.
Undoubtedly, to begin with, Chávez and the United Socialist Party enjoyed enormous popularity, especially in the shanty towns and amongst the rural poor. Essentially Chávez acted as a bonaparte, presiding over a plebeian-military regime. However, the economy has been effectively wrecked. Some put this down to falling oil prices, corruption and sheer incompetence. Undoubtedly, all factors. But in reality the blame lies squarely with the unremitting sabotage campaign conducted by imperialism - first and foremost, of course, the US. This is what has brought Venezuela to the brink of collapse. Hardly ideal conditions for fair elections, free speech and basic democratic rights.
Either way, it is clear that Donald Trump sees Venezuela as ripe for regime change from above: to be achieved by armed provocation, full-scale invasion or a colour revolution led by Machado. Her Peace Prize must be seen in this context.
According to the Norwegian Nobel Committee - a five-member political committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament and therefore chosen on a different basis to those that decide the awards for chemistry, physics, physiology/medicine and literature - Machado was chosen “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”.
By your friends
Machado had praised the “visionary” Trump after he deployed the US navy to the Caribbean in August with the stated goal of combatting the narco-gangs.2 Furthermore, Machado has voiced her support for Trump’s claim that a Venezuelan group, the Tren de Aragua, has launched an “invasion” of the US!3 The US president and top officials such as Stephen Miller have used that absurd claim as justification for its campaign against Venezuelan migrants - scores of whom have since been deported to the CECOT high-security prison in El Salvador. A living nightmare.
Another Nobel Peace Prize winner (in 2009), Barack Obama, congratulated Machado and said that the award should remind Americans of the “responsibility to constantly preserve and defend our own hard-won democratic traditions” - which seems grotesque, given her far-right friends and obvious authoritarian hankerings, not to mention the former US president’s warmongering track record.
Clinging to the same liberal illusions about the progressive nature of the prize, The Guardian tried to pretend that the Nobel Prize committee’s announcement - “when authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist” - was some sort of subtle criticism of Trump’s use of the military in US cities and relentless pressure on political enemies at home. In reality, it was quite clear from the context that this was a reference to Maduro’s actions in the Venezuelan presidential elections.4
In fact, you can quite reasonably argue that María Corina Machado is acting as a stand-in or proxy for Trump, on the basis that the committee did not want to upset Donald or get sanctions slapped on Norway. There was a genuine degree of nervousness in Oslo about the possible consequences of not awarding the prize to Trump, especially after he called the Norwegian finance minister and former head of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, to discuss the whole issue. Norway has also been under pressure from some US senators close to Trump after its giant sovereign wealth fund pulled out of Caterpillar, the American building equipment company, because it is complicit in Israeli crimes. Its D9 bulldozers have been weaponised. You can see them on your screens demolishing Palestinian homes, schools, villages and civilian infrastructure.
So the Nobel Committee held out the hope that maybe next year Trump could win the Peace Prize, once the Middle East ‘deal’ is actually in operation - which admittedly seems dubious - or if the US president somehow pulls something out of the hat over the Ukraine war. Perhaps the committee will decide to swallow Trump’s obvious nonsense about ending “seven wars” without even a “mention of the word ‘ceasefire’”. In the meantime the Trump administration says a Nobel Peace Prize is “well past time” for the US “peacemaker-in-chief”.5
Deserving it
There has been much liberal chat about how Donald Trump is not ‘deserving’ of a Nobel Peace Prize, but when you look at other recipients, why not?6 OK, Hitler’s nomination was meant to be a satirical joke by a Swedish legislator, Erik Brandt, in response to the nomination of Neville Chamberlain and his role in the Munich Agreement - but it was taken seriously by some, and sparked outrage and protests in Sweden and elsewhere.
Yet was Henry Kissinger ‘deserving’ of such a reward, even though he was actually a war criminal? Well, he got one in 1973 during the Vietnam war. Or was Jimmy Carter in 2002 essentially any different, and somehow ‘deserved’ the prize, unlike Kissinger? Or how about the odious Menachem Begin, “for jointly having negotiated peace” between Egypt and Israel in 1978? As the leader of the Zionist paramilitary group, Irgun, he clearly laid down the ideological blueprint for Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal assault on the Gazan people.
Then you have Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1994, “for their efforts to create peace” in the Middle East, which must classify as a genuinely sick joke. Or John Hume and David Trimble, for propping up the sectarian statelet in the Six Counties - or the obvious puppets of the so-called Women for Peace, Betty Williams and Mairead Maguire, who were consciously used to undermine the armed struggle conducted by the Provisional IRA. Plus Mikhail Gorbachev, for crying out loud, “for the leading role he played in the radical changes in east-west relations”.
Examining the history of the Nobel Peace Prize, it is impossible to come to anything other than the conclusion that the award is given every year for ‘services rendered to imperialism’ - whether pre-World War II it was a declining British imperialism, represented by the likes of Sir Austin Chamberlain (1925) and Arthur Henderson (1934), or a rival American imperialism with figures such as Theodore Roosevelt (1906) and Woodrow Wilson (1919). Or post-World War II and the hegemony of the US, whose ideals were deemed compatible with liberal bourgeois perspectives and are therefore currently espoused by most western states.
Yes, there was Nelson Mandela, but it is important to understand that he was not awarded the Peace Prize while he was in prison serving a life sentence for ‘terrorist offences’ (ie, the anti-apartheid struggle), but after he was released in 1993. A former member of the central committee of the South African Communist Party, Mandela was once considered a dangerous foe. But his undeniable popularity with the masses made him useful as an asset to imperialism, with its interest in overseeing a smooth, managed, peaceful transition from apartheid and white rule to a more stable capitalist regime. In other words, Mandela was jointly awarded the prize alongside FW de Klerk, the obnoxious final apartheid president, as part of the process of ensuring that his post-apartheid government pursued neoliberal economic policies - an economic model which led to the enrichment of a small black elite, while dismally failing to address the extreme poverty of the black masses.
But what about Mordechai Vanunu, who was nominated on a number of occasions? An Israeli who was kidnapped by Mossad, he spent 18 years in prison, including more than 11 in solitary confinement. But he never made it onto the final list, as he did not fit the agenda set by the committee. He was, after all, a nuclear technician who became an authentic peace advocate. Driven by revulsion of weapons of mass destruction, he exposed details of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme to the British media in 1988 - something that neither America nor Israel wanted to highlight.
There have been, and still are, those fighting for genuine peace and justice in opposition to imperialism and oppression - people not like Machado.