To the editor: President Trump may have trouble securing a Nobel Peace Prize for a reason not analyzed in Jackie Calmes’ column. (“Is this the way to win a Nobel Peace Prize?” Opinion, Feb. 23)
He and his most ardent advocates fail to recognize that the Norwegian pattern in naming a Nobel laureate for peace tends to be aspirational. Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee hope the prize will help a group or stimulate a result that will be good and long-lasting for mankind.
The Swedes, on the other hand, tend to award the scientific and literature Nobels based on the staying power and demonstrable benefits mankind reaps from the discoveries — using years, even decades, of evidence to be able to demonstrate the point.
The Trump campaign for the peace prize assumes his efforts to end hostilities among nations have been “unfairly” overlooked. The likelihood is that Norwegians view the “deals” he fashions as harshly conceived, short-term fixes that may fall apart or cause harm in the future.
Godfrey Harris, Los Angeles
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To the editor: Calmes very aptly compares Trump’s claim of candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s failed appeasement of Nazi Germany in 1938.
Chamberlain, at least, prepared his country for a possible war by increasing military spending, which helped stall Adolf Hitler’s aerial blitz two years later. By then, Chamberlain was no longer in office, his gesture of appeasement not having worked.
The comparison might have been even more apt if the prime minister had called on Poland to capitulate after Hitler’s attack in 1939, the year after the Nazis seized the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. By that time, however, Europe had seen where appeasement led, and Britain and France declared war on Germany in response to the attack on Poland.
No one wants war, even the aggressor, who would just as soon help himself to seizing what belongs to his neighbor without a fight. But sometimes, a war must be fought in self-defense. That’s why we and our allies have the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Urging the surrender of a nation that has been invaded is not a qualification for the Nobel Peace Prize, nor is demanding exorbitant ransom from the country seeking to defend itself.
Bill Seckler, Riverside
