On August 13, President Donald Trump shocked the world when he announced that his administration had brokered a peace deal that established normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. The UAE becomes the third Arab nation to forge normalized ties with the Jewish state after Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994). Moreover, the agreement, which has been aptly referred to by the administration as the Abraham Accord, paves the way for normalized relations with other Arab countries, including the Gulf States of Oman and Bahrain. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have since announced that they will open their skies to Israeli commercial traffic, signaling further détente with the Arab world.

The peace agreement forged between Israel and the UAE is unique for three reasons. First, it is the first peace agreement between Israel and an Arab party in which Israel was not required to cede land, setting a positive precedent. Second, it demonstrates that peace with the Arab world at large is not contingent upon progress on the “Palestinian” track. Third, there appears to be broad support among the UAE’s citizenry for the accord. Unlike the peace agreements forged with Egypt and Jordan, which were largely government-to-government understandings and characterized by a cold peace, there appears to be a genuine undercurrent of warmth between the Israeli and Emirati people.  

This foreign policy achievement by itself was monumental. Even New York Times op-ed writer and fierce Trump critic, Thomas Friedman, gave Trump an enthusiastic nod of approval characterizing the breakthrough as “a geopolitical earthquake.”

But establishing peace between historical Mideast enemies wasn’t enough for Donald Trump. He moved on to his next project; this time in the volatile Balkans. On September 4, the administration announced that it had brokered a deal between Serbia and Kosovo. The understanding, which is centered on economic cooperation involving multiple industries, benefits both nations and fosters business opportunities for outside investors from Europe and the United States.

The bitter enmity existing between Serbia and Kosovo spans 21 years after Serbs and Kosovars fought a particularly vicious war in which both sides inflicted brutality on the other. Thousands – civilians as well as combatants – were killed, while tens of thousands more were displaced. All that enmity evaporated during a signing ceremony at the White House in which the leaders of all three nations – Trump, Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic and Kosovo’s Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti – were present. Also present were Trump’s special envoy on Serbia and Kosovo Richard Grenell, his national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, and senior adviser and primary architect the UAE-Israel peace deal, Jared Kushner.

The multilateral deal had other positive ancillary implications as well. As part of the agreement, Serbia agreed to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. And Kosovo, which had hitherto no relations with the Jewish state, agreed to open an embassy in Jerusalem as well. In so doing, Kosovo becomes the first Muslim majority country to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, an astonishing achievement by any stretch.

By thinking out of the box and looking at the world though a prism untainted by the swamp, the Trump administration accomplished what previous American administrations could not. It had bucked politically insurmountable odds to foster cooperation between historical enemies and in so doing, brought political stability and economic opportunity to two volatile regions.

So will Trump receive a Nobel Peace Prize? Don’t hold your breath. The highbrow folks who sit on that worthless Norwegian Committee revile Trump. They are an integral part the swamp, viewing the world through an elitist prism that is detached from reality. These are the same people who gave a Nobel Peace Prize to the now deceased gangster of Ramallah, Yassir Arafat, a revolting figure who was arguably the most notorious terrorist of the last century and whose word wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

In October 2009, the Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama, barely nine months after the former freshman senator and community organizer assumed office as America’s 44th president. Between January 2009 and October 2009, Obama hadn’t a single foreign policy success. In fact, during his tenure, Obama’s foreign policy was marked by failure and fecklessness. He downplayed the ascendancy of ISIS, vacillated when Syria used poison gas against its own people, emboldened Iran through policies of appeasement, ignored human rights abuses in Turkey and China, and shut down a very promising investigation into Hezbollah’s transnational criminal enterprise.

The Nobel committee’s mindset mirrors that of the establishment media, which detests Trump and operates as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. That is why the establishment media buried the Israel-UAE peace accord beneath deprecatory articles on Trump and tributes to his challenger, despite the deal’s enormous positive implications for regional peace and stability. And that is why members of the press corps directed off-topic questions at Kushner, O’Brien and Grenell when the trio issued a press conference on the Serbia-Kosovo-Israel breakthrough. Grenell, though, would have none of it and angrily responded to a journalist’s off topic question by dryly asking the journalist if he could find Serbia or Kosovo on a map. But Grenell’s tongue lashing didn’t stop there. He deprecatingly noted that there was a “crisis in journalism,” and that “people aren’t listening to you (journalists) anymore.”

So despite his achievements in forging peace on two continents, Trump will not receive the Nobel Peace Prize. But judging by the lowly caliber of the people issuing that prize, their dishonest media allies, and their skewed world outlook, the lack of committee recognition, though contemptible, should be viewed as a positive thing.