Yet, if Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin deserved the prize for negotiating the 1978 Camp David Accords, US President Jimmy Carter for facilitating them, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for the first Oslo Accords, and Barack Obama just for being elected, then Trump has a legitimate claim.
The Abraham Accords, which normalised relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Morocco, was the signature foreign-policy achievement of Trump’s first term, every bit as important as the earlier peace treaties involving Israel, Egypt, Jordan and the PLO.
Trump also helped to thaw relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, leading to direct government-to-government contact.
Whether by design, luck or both, this week’s events make possible the hitherto even more unimaginable idea of relations thawing between Iran, the US and Israel.
Trump’s approach, and that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is probably not consistent with the international rules-based order, as our Labour Party has complained all week, obsessively parsing Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ suitably cautious statements.
Nor has Trump followed convention in properly briefing his Democratic Party opponents, causing them to spend the week similarly talking about minutiae, including themselves.
But if the current situation with Israel, Iran and its terrorist proxies is the best that nearly 80 years of the rules-based order can deliver, an unorthodox approach seems worth a go.
Recall that, since 1979, Iran’s declared policy has been death to America and Israel and for the Jewish people to be driven into the sea. To this end, it has funded terrorist groups throughout the region, attacking not just Israel but other neighbours it considers insufficiently hateful of “the Zionist entity”.
Even a modest nuclear capability would equip Iran to kill most or all of the seven million Jews and three million others who live in Israel, which has the same land area as Manawatū-Whanganui and is the only liberal democracy in the region.
Further recall that, on October 7, 2023, Iran’s terrorist proxy Hamas killed more than 1000 Israelis, mainly young people at a music festival, and raped and kidnapped hundreds more.
Per capita, that’s like a foreign-backed terrorist organisation killing more than 500 young New Zealanders at Rhythm & Vines and raping and kidnapping dozens more.
It was immediately obvious that Israel would feel the need to completely destroy Hamas, and that has unfolded in Gaza with all the savagery of a people badly wounded once again after being traumatised by 2000 years of antisemitism, persecution, pogroms and the Holocaust.
Even the most committed New Zealand supporters of Israel have been appalled by its lack of restraint. Yet we might also recall how we felt when France let off just two bombs in Auckland harbour, causing the manslaughter of just one foreign visitor.
Hamas has now largely been destroyed, as has Iran’s terrorist proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon to Israel’s north, and Iran’s sole regional ally, the Assad regime in Syria.
Two weeks ago, Israel attacked Iran’s air-defence, missile and nuclear capabilities, largely rendering them ineffective and taking control of its skies, while Trump pitched in with his one-off attack against Iran’s nuclear bunkers with technology available only to the US.
Taken as a whole, Iran is now massively weakened compared with two years ago, with the US having conducted just a single operation.
That’s entirely different from George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, and his and Obama’s failed attempts to nation-build there and in Afghanistan.
The most impressive part of Trump’s approach is his restraint and relative even-handedness. No US President has spoken as fiercely against Israel as Trump did on Tuesday, after Israel threatened to retaliate against a relatively minor Iranian violation of the ceasefire.
He just shrugged when Iran attacked the US base in Qatar, a US ally with Saudi Arabia, Israel, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, Jordan and Egypt.
He summed up his attitude best with his succinct, if unorthodox, comment that Iran and Israel “have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*** they’re doing”.
After the Iranian-funded October 7 massacre and the brutal imprecision of Israel’s response in Gaza, who would disagree?
Trump’s sentiment and vocabulary achieved the seemingly impossible of getting Netanyahu to hold fire and Iran to agree to hold talks on longer-term peace and de-nuclearisation as early as next week.
Trump is surely exaggerating when he boasts that Iran’s nuclear capability was “obliterated” by his strikes, but that won’t matter if the negotiations proceed as planned.
While Iran is now busily rounding up and executing Israeli spies – to which not even the spies themselves could object – its moderate President, Masoud Pezeshkian, now promises domestic political reform.
That has a much greater chance of success if pursued internally by the regime, rather than imposed externally the way Bush and Obama tried elsewhere.
Meanwhile, this same week, Trump successfully strengthened and restored the North Atlantic alliance, which, since World War II, has largely kept the peace for the longest period in that region’s known history.
Nato members have pledged to increase traditional defence spending to 3.5% of GDP and defence-related spending to 1.5%, for the 5% total Trump has always sought.
That amounts to a doubling of defence investment over the next decade and will make Western and Central Europe less reliant on another 80 years of US taxpayer goodwill.
In response, Trump has renewed the US commitment to the cornerstone of the Nato alliance, “that an attack on one is an attack on all”, and to supporting Ukraine.
That should keep all of Nato and its friends safe for the foreseeable future from Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies in China, North Korea and Iran.
Love him or hate him, Trump has made everyone’s world much safer this week.
