South Korean president Moon Jae-in said Monday that President Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in spurring negotiations between North and South Korea after a decades-long stand off.
“President Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize. What we need is only peace,” Moon told a meeting of senior secretaries in response to the suggestion that he deserved the award, according to a South Korean official who briefed the media.
Kim Jong-un became the first North Korean leader to cross into the South last week for a summit that culminated in a pledge to work toward the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula and the official end of the Korean War. The leaders also agreed to stop blaring propaganda on loudspeakers positioned on the border between their countries.
After a year of increasingly stringent economic sanctions and aggressive rhetorical posturing, Trump plans to meet with Kim in the next two to three weeks to negotiate a possible cessation of sanctions in exchange for North Korean denuclearization.
Moon has praised Trump’s efforts to open dialogue between the North and the South, saying in January that the American president “deserves big credit for bringing about the inter-Korean talks. It could be a resulting work of the U.S.-led sanctions and pressure.”
Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 just months into his tenure for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Many observers argued at the time that the award was premature, as Obama had been in office for barely a year and his record of foreign-policy achievement was fairly thin.
If he was awarded the prize, Trump would join Obama, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jimmy Carter as the only American presidents to win it.