No Nobel, No Peace

L'État, C'est Moi

Ronald Reagan kept a sign on his Oval Office desk that read: “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”

President Trump offered the metaphysical opposite of that Monday when he inverted the idea:

There are limits to doing what’s right if you don’t get the credit.

According to a text message first published by PBS, Trump wrote to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre:

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”

Trump offered this as explanation for his push to acquire Greenland—a Danish territory over which Norway has no authority, making the grievance even more arbitrary.

The President isn’t just venting at an enemy, but at a neighbor who doesn’t even own the thing he’s mad about, and Norway doesn’t actually award the prize (the independent committee does). The grievance is built on a misunderstanding of the very institution it seeks validation from.

It doesn’t matter. In this vision of the presidency, whatever the personal feeling, it is correct. The continuum of presidential force runs from the republican principle to the imperial presidency to ‘L’etat, c’est moi’. ("The state, it is me.")

We’re in that neighborhood now. When peace and war turn on whether a president feels personally slighted, the distinction between the man and the state collapses.

It turns out Monday, January 19, 2026 was a day for metaphysical opposites. Three American cardinals chose that day to issue a statement proclaiming that military force must be “a last resort in extreme situations, not a normal instrument of national policy.” Cardinals Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, and Joseph Tobin of Newark released their joint statement, “Charting A Moral Vision of American Foreign Policy,” writing:

“We renounce war as an instrument for narrow national interests and proclaim that military action must be seen only as a last resort in extreme situations, not a normal instrument of national policy. We seek a foreign policy that respects and advances the right to human life, religious liberty, and the enhancement of human dignity throughout the world.”

The cardinals were responding to recent administration actions in Venezuela and threats regarding Greenland, invoking Pope Leo XIV’s January warning that “war is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading... Peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion.”

Cardinal McElroy added: “Catholic social teaching testifies that when national interest narrowly conceived excludes the moral imperative of solidarity among nations... it brings immense suffering to the world.”

Trump’s message to Norway represents the metaphysical opposite of this tradition. Every moral framework—religious¹ or secular, realist or idealist—holds that leaders serve something larger than themselves: the state, humanity, moral law, strategic interest.

Trump has inverted this. His message treats peace as a performance for external validation—a favor he did that deserved recognition. No prize means he’s “released” from his “obligation.”

The cardinals invoke a vision where “national interest narrowly conceived” leads to “immense suffering.” Trump has gone further: national interest redefined as whatever pleases or displeases the president personally. The narrowest conception possible.

Pope Leo warned that peace is being “sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion.” Trump’s message to Norway makes it explicit: I sought peace as a condition for asserting my own glory. Didn’t get it. Now I’m free to think about dominion instead.

Defenders of this kind of approach suggest it is a variation on the “Madman Theory” designed to keep allies on their toes and extract better terms. But as political scientist Roseanne McManus has noted, “if you act irrational all the time, no one will trust you to honor any agreement you make.” If a security guarantee is conditional on the President’s daily mood, it’s no longer an alliance; it’s a protection racket.

Allies don’t negotiate under those terms; they hedge. They look to China, the EU, or their own nuclear deterrents because they can’t bet national survival on the stability of a text message.

Reagan’s desk sign wasn’t just a quaint moral lesson about humility, but a blueprint for a functioning world order. By “not minding who gets the credit,” a leader builds a reservoir of trust that allows the state to act with a force greater than any one man. By demanding the credit as a prerequisite for doing the work, the President hasn’t just abandoned the republican principle. He has shrunk the power of the United States to the size of his own grievances. He is exploring the limit to what a man can do.

1. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”

The entire point of the Beatitudes is that the virtue lies in the act itself, not in earthly recognition or reward. You make peace because that’s what’s right, not to collect a prize. The “blessing” is in being the kind of person who does this work.

The transactional inversion - “I made peace so where’s my Nobel, and if I don’t get it I’m done with peace” - is essentially the opposite of every major religious and moral tradition’s teaching about righteousness. Whether it’s Buddhist non-attachment to results, the Stoic focus on virtue as its own reward, or Jewish concepts of obligation regardless of recognition, they all share this: you do the right thing because it’s right, not because someone’s keeping score.