US President Donald Trump has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize after helping to facilitate a peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
The nomination was submitted by Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of the Norwegian Parliament who also nominated Trump in 2018, according to Fox News.
In an interview, he told the network: “For his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees."
He said: “The committee should look at the facts and judge him on the facts – not on the way he behaves sometimes.
"The people who have received the Peace Prize in recent years have done much less than Donald Trump. For example, Barack Obama did nothing.”
Mr Tybring-Gjedde said the nomination is not an attempt to come into favour with the president, adding: “I’m not a big Trump supporter.”
In the nomination letter, he highlighted Trump's “key role in facilitating contact between conflicting parties and … creating new dynamics in other protracted conflicts, such as the Kashmir border dispute between India and Pakistan, and the conflict between North and South Korea, as well as dealing with the nuclear capabilities of North Korea.”
He also praised Trump for breaking "a 39-year-old streak of American Presidents either starting a war or bringing the United States into an international armed conflict."
"The last president to avoid doing so was Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter,” he wrote.
Four U.S. presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize to date, including Barack Obama, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter.
The winner will be announced in October 2021.
