Peace Prize for War
Pakistan’s nomination of Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize reveals the contradictions in its geopolitical aspirations.
Against the backdrop of Israel’s US-backed ongoing genocide in Gaza, unrelenting siege on the West Bank, assaults on Lebanon and Yemen, and a bombing campaign against Iran, the Government of Pakistan nominated Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The nomination strikingly mirrored recent Zionist praise of Trump’s role in the war. Days earlier, Netanyahu commended Trump for ‘guiding the free world with courage’ through the war on Iran. Pakistan’s effusive, sycophantic announcement lauded Trump for his ‘pivotal leadership,’ ‘great strategic foresight,’ and ‘stellar statesmanship’ for de-escalating the India-Pakistan skirmishes of May 2025, and his purported dedication to resolving the Kashmir ‘dispute.’
Two days later, the United States formally entered the war on Iran, launching airstrikes in Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan. The irony was not lost on the public. Pakistani social media was flooded with screenshots of the government’s nomination announcement juxtaposed with news headlines indicating what could be the beginning of another imperial war on the Middle East.
The nomination–as farcical and bizarre it may seem in the current moment–lays bare the contradictions in Pakistan’s geopolitical aspirations, as well as the ruling military elite’s disregard for popular sentiment in this current conjuncture. Amid growing anti-Zionist sentiment and an increasingly vocal disdain for American imperial hegemony, fueled by its unconditional and ever-growing support for the Israeli regime’s genocidal rampages, criticism has been mounting both within Pakistan and globally–even if to little effect. It is no surprise that the symbolic move to proclaim Trump a ‘peacemaker’ has been widely condemned as both unconscionable and tone deaf.
However, to fixate on the military-elite nexus’s refusal to heed popular sentiment regarding the United States remains naive. Pakistan’s history of colluding with the United States has consistently resulted in the loss of Pakistani and Afghan life, mass internal displacement, and precarity on the regional front. Serving as a satellite for hegemonic interests in exchange for blood-soaked dollars has resulted in the deaths of thousands in Waziristan, Bajaur and Kurram. Despite this campaign’s unpopularity and the toll it exacted, the Pakistani state continued to nod along in compliance. Notably, these killings were authorized by Barack Obama, another Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Today, the Pakistani ruling class contends with a complex range of needs: upholding its aspirations for regional hegemony, financing–and profiting from–a highly securitized and extractive regime of mineral exploration, while simultaneously preserving a facade of moral legitimacy in the international arena vis-à-vis India. The urge to appease the United States, whether through bizarre gestures like the nomination, or worse, a material and geopolitical alignment with its policies, must be understood within the context of the ruling military elite’s desire to reproduce its dominance within Pakistan, enabled by the United States’ enduring acceptance of this role.
The nomination was preceded by a White House lunch, where Trump and his associates hosted Pakistan’s recently self-crowned Field Marshal, General Asim Munir, underscoring the brazen collusion between the two apex decision-makers. Yet, it is important to note that in some ways, the meeting also marks a departure from precedent. Trump’s decision to meet with the upper echelons of Pakistan’s security establishment outwardly signals a continuity in US-Pakistan military relations that was, in the past, obscured by the facade of engagement with civilian governments. Although the ruling military and its cronies within the political elite are confronted with a domestic crisis of legitimacy, opposition to the regime has been systematically purged, while other fronts stand fractured and the space for a credible political alternative remains bleak. In this context, imperial patronage for the security establishment, whatever its terms may be, is likely a recipe for bolstering domestic oppression. History shows us that the United States’ strategic clientelism with Pakistan (and elsewhere in the world) has never accounted for the human cost of bolstering the sub-imperial role of the Pakistani state and its various violent manifestations.
Simultaneously, using this nomination to assert that the United States is invested in brokering a just solution on Kashmir is a facile attempt to delude onlookers about America’s bipartisan support for occupation elsewhere in the world. If anything, Trump’s recent statements on ‘rehabilitating’ Gaza by turning it into a commercial and colonial outpost are indicative of the nature of ‘solutions’ envisioned by the imperial machine. To politely call for the implementation of UN resolutions, in a context where the institution and whatever facade of authority it previously maintained has thoroughly and visibly unraveled–mostly due to the United States’ genocidal overtures–is nothing but empty theatrics.
At a time when states appear incapacitated to act against the genocidal onslaught unleashed by Israel and bankrolled by the United States, symbolic gestures can speak volumes. The award may have lost all legitimacy long ago, having been conferred on figures like Henry Kissinger, Barack Obama, Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon. Yet, to nominate Trump for the prize almost simultaneously as he called for all of Tehran to evacuate is a slap in the face to front-line victims of imperialism today. What remains to be seen is how Pakistan’s submissive overtures, and all that they signify, will shape America’s hegemonic designs and the inevitably disastrous roles it will assign to Pakistan.
Asmer Asrar Safi is a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford from Lahore, Pakistan. His research focuses on the intellectual history of Muslim revolutionary traditions in 20th-century South Asia. He was a former member of the Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP) Coalition and is a member of the Jamhoor team.
