A Nobel Wheeze

In a recent The Rest Is Politics Alastair Campbell made a suggesion that I suspect wasn't entirely serious. It seems to me though that it deserves serious consideration.

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Habitués of The Rest Is Politics will be familiar with the frequent interruptions made by Rory Stewart when  Alastair Campbell jumps in in medias res (as Rory might put it).

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Stewart doesn't always manage to keep Campbell in check. A recent example of a misinterpretation that he didn't forestall involved a bit of proof-reading jargon. In a recent podcast Alastair Campbell seemed to be talking about someone called 'Elsie Conservative'. He was halfway through the next sentence  before I realized that he had said '(l.c.) conservative'. Until my short spell working at OUP in the early 1980s I hadn't met the abbreviation 'l.c.' (=lower case), and I've never before heard 'small-c conservative' rendered in this way.

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This is what Wikipedia says about USAID: 

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was created to provide foreign aid, disaster relief, and economic development.^[4] Established in 1961 during the Cold War by President John F. Kennedy, USAID was designed to counter the Soviet Union through the use of soft power across the world. In 1998, USAID was reorganized by Congress as an independent agency.

With average annual disbursements of about $23 billion from 2001 to 2024, USAID had missions in over 100 countries, in areas as diverse as education, global health, environmental protection, and democratic governance. An estimated 91.8 million deaths, including 30.4 million among children younger than five years old, were likely prevented by USAID funding between 2001 and 2021.... 

On January 24, 2025 President Donald Trump ordered a near-total freeze on all foreign aid.  In February, the administration placed most employees on administrative leave. The absence of authorization from Congress led to lawsuits against the Trump administration.Also in February, the administration made several allegations of wasteful spending and fraud, allegations which were generally reported [HD: sic; many observers would prefer 'found'] to be false.

Several days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for humanitarian aid. However, a key issue developed over whether the waivers for lifesaving aid were actually translating into aid flowing. Despite the waiver, there was still much confusion about what agencies should do. More than 1,000 USAID employees and contractors were fired or furloughed following the near-total freeze on U.S. global assistance that the second Trump  administration implemented.

On January 27, 2025, the agency's official government website was shut down. 

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Generally I've removed footnote references from that Wikipedia entry, as they wouldn't work  without a lot of recoding. But one footnote points to this Impact Metrics Dashboard (and at time of blogpost, the most recent upate was on 26 June). If, in a Wikipedia-esque sort of way, you think 'NEEDS CITATION', you know where to look.
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 Alastair Campbell's idea is in two steps:

1. Nominate USAID for the Peace Prize.
2. Invite Trump to receive it on their  behalf, given that they have been disbanded.
   
   
   

I'm afraid that 2 is unlikely to happen, for  diplomatic reasons. Besides, Trump wouldn't accept. But I think the first step is worth considering. The criteria for those qualified to make nominations, according to  the Peace Prize criteria for nominators  include:

• Members of national assemblies and national governments (cabinet members/ministers) of sovereign states as well as current heads of state...

and

University professors, professors emeriti and associate professors of history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology, and religion; university rectors and university directors (or their equivalents)... 

So most citizens of the free world  could ask a member of a national assembly to do it, and any suitably qualified academic could do it. I'm sure there must be dozens of Harvard staff who would happily join in.

It's not uncommon for  the Peace Prize to be awarded to an institution. The only drawback I can see is that the Nobel Committee might invoke the No Posthumous Prizes rule, which I thought had been invented of the cuff by a misogynist to justify the exclusion of Rosalind Franklin from Crick and Watson's prize. And as the earliest date for the award would be 2026 USAID will by then be well and truly defunct.

That's enough for today.

b