Opinion | A Worthy Nobel Peace Laureate

According to Alfred Nobel’s will, a Nobel Prize is meant to be given to those who “during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” Note the word “preceding”: Those of us who think Donald Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in ending (or at least pausing) the war in Gaza will have to wait until next year’s awards are announced.

We shouldn’t hold our breath.

In the meantime, the Norwegian Nobel Committee chose well in awarding this year’s peace prize Friday to María Corina Machado, the 58-year-old Venezuelan opposition leader now in hiding from the regime of Nicolás Maduro. By doing so, the committee also indicted that regime and its 26-year record of ruin, carried out in the name of “Bolivarian” socialism with the credulous support of many Western progressives.

Machado earned her Nobel last year when, after being blocked by the government from running for president, she rallied behind Edmundo González, a nonpartisan candidate, further helping to consolidate a once-divided opposition camp. González went on to win the vote by more than two to one, according to independent surveys, only to see Maduro ignore the result and install himself for another six-year term, throwing nearly 2,000 political dissidents into prison in the bargain.

Machado’s own career as a dissident began more than 20 years ago, after she co-founded an election-monitoring group because of her fears of the ways that Maduro’s immediate predecessor, Hugo Chávez, was systematically undermining Venezuela’s democratic institutions. In 2005, his regime charged her with treason for supporting a recall referendum; in 2014, she faced treason charges again for participating in anti-regime protests. In 2024, she published an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal that began: “I am writing this from hiding, fearing for my life, my freedom, and that of my fellow countrymen from the dictatorship led by Nicolás Maduro.”

That record of farsightedness and courage stands in sharp and shaming contrast to the credulity of the regime’s fellow travelers in the West. Among them, Naomi Klein, the Canadian writer, who in 2007 lauded Chávez for turning Venezuela into a place where “citizens had renewed their faith in the power of democracy to improve their lives”; Chesa Boudin, the former San Francisco district attorney, who in 2009 cheered Chávez’s “commitment to the democratic process” as the leader opened “the door to his possible life tenure”; and Jeremy Corbyn, the former British Labour Party leader, who in 2013 hailed Chávez for “showing that the poor matter” and making “massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world.”

Since the catastrophe of Chavismo became evident — skyrocketing murder rates, widespread hunger and starvation, millions of ordinary people fleeing the country on foot, leaders charged with enriching themselves through drug trafficking — these former cheerleaders have, for the most part, gone silent. Klein apparently squeaked out something about the regime’s “petro-populism,” but, to borrow a slogan familiar to her side, when it comes to Venezuela, silence is violence. Choosing to ignore the catastrophe there only serves to perpetuate it.

What should be done?

In January, I noted in a column that everything that’s been tried so far has failed. Elections: stolen. Sanctions: ineffectual. Arrest warrants and bounties: ditto. Machado’s Nobel will bring some attention to the regime’s repression. But as other dissident winners may attest, the effect is likely to be short-lived and slight. The 2021 peace prize to Dmitry Muratov, editor of an independent Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, did nothing to shake Vladimir Putin’s rule; the 2023 prize, to the Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi, did nothing to free her from an Iranian prison.

That leaves the option to which the Trump administration seems increasingly inclined: regime change.

The best way to accomplish this is by offering Maduro and his inner circle the equivalent of a Bashar al-Assad option: permanent exile to a friendly state, if not Russia then probably Cuba. That could be matched by an offer of mass amnesty to lower-level civilian and military regime officials, provided they swear loyalty to a democratic government under a legitimately elected leader.

This seems to be the real purpose of Trump’s gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean: Induce enough fear, and the bad guys might run. It’s Machado’s view, too: Maduro and his cronies, she told the BBC last week, “won’t go unless he realizes that there is a credible threat, that things are going to get worse every day that goes by for them.” But that in turn requires a willingness by the Trump administration to continue to escalate, up to the point of a full-scale military confrontation.

That would entail unquestionable and deadly risks, to Venezuelans and Americans alike. It might also put Trump’s long-coveted Nobel Peace Prize permanently out of reach.

Then again, there are greater peace prizes than the Nobel — a prize never won by Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman or other world-historical figures who knew that the path to peace can’t always lie through peace alone. If the sacrifice Trump must make for putting an end to the horror of the Maduro regime is forgoing the prize for himself, he can take solace in the fact that Machado dedicated her prize to “the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support.”

Now is the time to act.

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