Tom Loftus: My five Nobel Peace Prizes

Also, a short history of American presidents and the prize.

The column below reflects the views of the author, and these opinions are neither endorsed nor supported by WisOpinion.com.

If you are the United States Ambassador to Norway, as I was from 1993 to 1998, the politics of the Nobel Peace Prize comes to your inbox every October when the prize recipient is announced by the Nobel Committee.

One American ambassador, a fellow Wisconsinite, was called on to accept the prize.

On December 10, 1920, Albert G. Schmedeman, the United States ambassador to Norway, accepted the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of President Woodrow Wilson “in recognition of his Fourteen Points peace program and his work in achieving inclusion of the Covenant of the League of Nations in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles”.

Wilson could not attend the 1919 ceremony because of ill health.

The Nobel Committee had awarded the prize to Wilson in 1919, but the vote was not unanimous. The no votes were miffed at the rejection of US membership in the League by the US Senate.

This was one of many times the prize committee vote was not unanimous. Several times committee members resigned over the choice by the majority.

(Schmedeman went on to become Mayor of Madison and a one term Governor of Wisconsin, 1933-34.)

There have been 19 times the prize was not awarded: the years of WWI and WWII and several times there has not been a living candidate thought suitable.

The prize must be given to a living person. The year Ghandi died, there was no prize and that was how he was honored.

When Swedish arms merchant Alfred Nobel (invented dynamite) died in 1896, he left money to establish Nobel Prizes to be awarded in Stockholm, except for the peace prize which is awarded every December 10th in Oslo. Nobel thought the Norwegians were “more peaceful.”

The Award is recipient is chosen by a vote of the five members of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. Members are chosen by the political parties represented in the Norwegian Parliament. They cannot be members of the Parliament. The largest party, which has been Labour, gets two of the five.

This eminent group usually started their careers as party politicians who went on to be venerable elder statesmen and women. Their party lineage is why they get chosen in almost every case.

Any meddling in choosing the prize recipient by a government in power is strictly forbidden. It would be a major scandal for the prime minister and enough to bring the government down.

The late Geir Lundestad, the Director of the Nobel Institute from 1990 to 2014, who became my dear friend, lays it all bare in his memoir on the history of the prize, “The World’s Most Prestigious Prize: The Inside Story of the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Geir Lundestad was a noted historian of American foreign policy during the Cold War. His successor Alav Njølstad, is also a noted historian. His specialty: nuclear weapons policy during the Cold War.

Geir and Olav in their capacity as the Secretary of the Nobel Committee did the vetting of the last cut of nominees for the prize and prepared research papers for the five members of the Committee who make the decision.

There is an official list of organizations and individuals who can nominate prize candidates. The nominations are in the hundreds and only made public after fifty years. This is why there is an annual game around the world of politicians announcing they have been nominated, usually before an election.

Consider the avalanche of names that comes from this category alone of eligible nominators: “University professors, professors emeriti and associate professors of history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology, and religion; university rectors and university directors (or their equivalents); directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes.” See the criteria for nominators.

My first Nobel Peace Prize was in 1990 when I happened to be in Oslo. I was the speaker of the Assembly in the Wisconsin Legislature at the time. The American Ambassador Loret Miller Ruppe, from Milwaukee, invited me to attend the ceremony where Mikhail Gorbachev, the President of the Soviet Union, was to receive the prize for his role in ending the Cold War. He didn’t show for fear there would be coup while he was absent from Moscow.

On my watch, it was awarded in 1993 to Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk for ending apartheid in South Africa. The honor was designed to help Mandela when he would become the president of the new South Africa. I had a private meeting with Mandela to work out a deal beneficial to South Africa on tariffs.

In 1994 the prize was shared by Israel’s foreign minister Shimon Peres, Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat for their involvement in the Oslo Accords in order to help them carry out the accords’ efforts to secure peace in the Middle East. Many a trying time I met with Arafat.

In 1995, the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nobel went to Joseph Rotblat, the nuclear physicist who left Los Alamos in protest of the Manhattan Project and jilted Robert Oppenheimer. 

In 1996, Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and José Ramos-Horta shared the prize “for their work towards a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in East Timor” in order to increase their status for governing East Timor.

And in 1997, it was the International Campaign to Band Landmines and the force behind the Campaign Jody Williams, an American. It was hoped the prize would influence the non-signers of the treaty, including President Bill Clinton. Princess Diana, who died just before this prize, was a champion of the cause. All my diplomatic skills were on call for this contentious event where Jody had the most unflattering things to say about President Clinton. (Finland will leave the international agreement banning landmines in 2026, and the three Baltic states and Poland have signaled they also are withdrawing in response to the threat of Russian aggression.)

In each of these years, I was at the center of the swirl of side meetings regarding the prize — the dealmaking and the ruffled-feathers smoothing.

I chronicle it all in my memoir “Mission to Oslo: Dancing With the Queen, Dealmaking With the Russians, Shaping History,” published in 2024 by Little Creek Press.

Oh, and I did try to influence the prize decision. With champagne glass in hand and strategically constructed seating arrangements at dinners, I diplomatically lobbied for the prize on behalf of Jimmy Carter. I made a similarly determined effort on behalf of my friend Richard Holbrooke for negotiating the Dayton Accords ending the war in the Balkans. A shame that he did not get a co-prize in 1997. Carter and Holbrooke were frequent and very welcome visitors to Oslo. At dinners, Geir Lundestad was seated next to them.

American presidents and the prize comprise a slim list.

Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the Peace Prize in 1906 in recognition of his efforts to broker a peaceful end to the Russo-Japanese War. In his Nobel Lecture, he called for an organization of nations to end war.

Woodrow Wilson received it in 1919 for helping end WWI and founding the League of Nations, which was the type of organization Roosevelt envisioned.

The prize went to Jimmy Carter in 2002 for “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

Barack Obama was awarded the prize in 2009 for his promotion of nuclear nonproliferation and his support of multilateral diplomacy. This award was criticized but the committee felt vindicated in 2010 when Obama successfully negotiated with President Dmitry Medvedev of the Russian Federation the new START treaty, which outlines verifiable measures for the ‘Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms.’ (Putin, formerly and currently the president, was prime minister at the time.) The treaty expires February 5, 2026.

Geir Lundestad after he retired said he regretted this prize and criticized the decision to appoint former Labour Party Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland to the Committee because this damaged the Committee’s reputation for independence. Jagland was the Chairman of the Committee in 2009. Nobel secretary regrets Obama peace prize – BBC News

All of the prizes of my time fit in with the trend of recent decades of awards that will help the recipient’s cause in the future; and the control of nuclear weapons.

A good bet is 2025 will be the 20th time the Nobel Committee does not award a prize. (You can place bets on the prize at Fanduel and Draftkings)

Why might there be no prize in 2025? Two reason: no suitable person and the looming nuclear arms race.

And, as all politics is local, a no prize would be a statement on what is happening to Norway, which is a hot new Cold War in the Arctic on its — and NATO’s — border with Putin’s Russia.

Most Norwegians, in a recent poll, said they expect a new conflict in Europe. The Peace Research Institute of Oslo’s survey shows a rise in fear of war among Norwegians.

The Norwegian Prime Minister has issued a White Paper to inform the country on preparations underway for “crisis and war.” 

Historians are writing columns aplenty and flatly stating that there might be a ceasefire in Ukraine but there will not be lasting peace. The Russian archetype, through tsars, the Soviet Union, and Putin, is never going away. When history presents a choice between being a good neighbor or a big neighbor, Russia invariably chooses the latter.

In dealing with Russia historians urge the Roosevelt diplomatic approach: “Speak softly but carry a big stick”, and to heed the warning in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture: “Peace is generally good in itself…but becomes a very evil thing if it serves merely as a mask for cowardice and sloth, or as an instrument to further the ends of despotism or anarchy.”

Tom Loftus is former ambassador to Norway and author of the prize winning memoir “Mission to Oslo: Dancing with the Queen, Dealmaking with the Russians, Shaping History.” Read an excerpt here.

Post script: the current Nobel Peace Prize director is Professor Kristian Berg Harpviken.