Trump the peacemaker? South Korean president says Donald ‘can take the Nobel prize’
US President Donald Trump "can take the Nobel prize" as long as the Koreas receive peace in return, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said on Monday, just months after Trump threatened North Korea with total destruction.
Last week, Moon and Kim attended a summit at Panmunjom in the demilitarized zone, during which the two men walked across the border between their two countries and agreed to work toward ending decades-long animosities.
Following that historic meeting and new pledges to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, Trump tweeted that Americans "should be very proud" of the progress being made. With that progress came calls for Trump to receive the Nobel Peace Prize — and Trump seems happy to take the credit for the recent breakthrough.
But missing from much of the coverage are mentions of the years of diplomacy and huge efforts made by other leaders — not to mention the fact that only months ago, Trump the peacemaker was threatening North Korea with nuclear annihilation.
Trump has relied on somewhat unorthodox methods when it comes to fighting for peace and denuclearization in the Korean peninsula.
The American president has utilized Twitter to engage in deft diplomacy on more than one occasion. His peace-seeking tweets included such classics as ‘my nuclear button is bigger than yours,’ trying to negotiate is a ‘waste of time’ and ‘Little Rocket Man’ is on a ‘suicide mission.’
In another stunning display of diplomatic genius, Trump used his speech at the United Nations General Assembly last year to threaten to “totally destroy” North Korea if it did not comply with Washington’s demands.
But Trump’s commitment to peace did not stop there. In a determined effort to end the suffering in war-torn Syria, Trump again used Twitter to promise that“nice and new and smart!”peace bombs would be raining down on the country.
Is there no end to his benevolence?
If Trump won the Nobel Peace Prize, he would be joining other esteemed winners like former President Barack Obama, who won the prize mere months into his first term as president — a decision which was later publicly regretted by a former secretary of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee after Obama bombed seven countries in six years. Trump would also join the company of longtime Hillary Clinton pal and former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, or as some like to call him, a war criminal and stage-manager of genocide.
While some on Twitter agreed with Moon that Trump deserved the peace prize, others were less enthusiastic, calling the prize a “joke” and suggesting the best thing Trump could do to deserve it would be to resign.
Let’s not cheapen Henry Kissinger’s Nobel Peace Prize by giving one to Trump.
— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) April 29, 2018
To be fair, the nobel peace prize is in many ways a joke. Kissinger, perhaps the greatest living unpunished mass murderer, has one for negotiating an end to a war that hadn’t ended when the US left. Obama got one literally just for being Obama at the start of the Obama era... https://t.co/otCztCJW8L
— Asawin Suebsaeng (@swin24) April 30, 2018
If trump wants to win the Nobel peace prize he should resign
— Mike (@25nowfor45) April 30, 2018
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