End the Nobel Peace Prize

“So Trump is promoting peace by weakening the U.S. military?”

“Well, he doesn’t think of it that way.”

“Do we give someone a Nobel Prize for the effect of his action, but not his intention?” At this he hesitated and said the effect and intention of the Israeli-Emirati agreement were aligned, and that was what should matter.

He admitted that Trump won’t win the prize, if only because of the man’s vulgarity and crude behavior. “I know a couple of [the five members of the committee],” he said. “And they are looking for people who should behave a certain way. It’s not like chemistry—if they find out you have four divorces and are bad personally, they will never not give you the chemistry prize for that.”

By now the contradictions of the peace prize should be apparent. Is it given for peace, or for rumors of peace? Do you deserve a prize for maintaining despots, as long as the despots are part of a stable network? Is it given for accidentally wrecking a great military—or only if the destruction is intentional? What if you do all the right things, but you are a boor, or an alleged rapist? To these questions one might add a counsel of humility: If you have given the prize to enablers of genocide, kleptocrats, serial fabricators, and AIDS conspiracists, maybe you should sit out the next few rounds.

The peace prize has always been subjective—more so than the science prizes and, I would argue, the literature prize—and it is healthy for the prize to evolve, as we come to a better understanding of how to achieve durable peace. But its incoherence has become too great. The honor doesn’t incentivize peace, if one year you give it to Kissinger (starter of many conflicts, ender of one), and another you give it to Mother Teresa (who never started a war, but who—as Christopher Hitchens liked to point out—used her Nobel lecture to inform the world that the “greatest destroyer of world peace” was abortion). Tybring-Gjedde suggests that brief conversations with hideous men are a reason to award the prize, and its history suggests that he might be right. Then again, Barack Obama won the prize in 2009, while refusing to meet with Kim Jong-il and, by the way, expanding America’s drone program. (He won for his promotion of, notably not his success in achieving, “cooperation between peoples.”)

Read: The quirkiest takes on Obama’s Nobel Prize

All of this points to one of two conclusions: The Nobel Committee can either give the prize to do-gooder organizations such as the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders (and play things extra safe), or it can keep the prize locked away for a while, and reevaluate its reasoning for a modern era. I suspect that that reevaluation will end, if the committee is honest, with the admission that peace can be recognized only by its fruits, which take decades to mature, and not by its seeds. To keep giving awards for the seeds is to court embarrassment, and to make yourself hostage to wacky attention-seeking nominations like Trump’s. Better to shut it down, before the trolls do first.

Graeme Wood is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters With the Islamic State.