The Nobel Peace Prize: a Geopolitical Tool

By Cuban Ambassador Pedro Monzon Barata

The Core Contradiction and its Hypocritical Framework

Since its creation by Alfred Nobel in 1895, the Nobel Peace Prize has been held up as the ultimate symbol for peace. But let’s be clear: from the very beginning, it was built on a glaring contradiction. Think about it—the man who made his fortune from dynamite, and whose family firm, Bofors, became a major arms dealer, left behind a peace prize that would be managed by the political establishment of a rising nation-state. This isn’t just a quirky detail from his biography; it’s wired into the prize’s very structure. The award is handed out by a committee of five people appointed by the Norwegian Parliament, tying it directly to Norway’s own political and geopolitical alliances. Because of this, the prize has rarely been a genuine judge of peaceful intentions. Far more often, it’s worked as a refined tool of soft power for maintaining Western dominance, a way to make certain political actions look legitimate while brushing others aside. The Cuban scholar José Antonio García hit the nail on the head when he said: “The Nobel Peace Prize is not an award for peace, but an instrument of soft power in the battle for global cultural and political hegemony.” In practice, it’s a reward for falling in line with a specific, liberal-internationalist worldview, often camouflaging strategic power plays in the language of universal peace.

This manipulation works through a stubborn double standard. The kind of “peace” the Committee celebrates is almost always the kind that suits the security and economic interests of the North Atlantic powers. Liberation movements in the Global South get branded as terrorists, while similar tactics by Western-backed groups are praised as fights for freedom. By controlling the story like this, the prize sets up a hierarchy of whose suffering matters and who gets to define what peace even means—a version of peace that usually protects the existing power structure instead of confronting what really causes conflict: imperialism, exploitation, and deep-seated inequality.

The  Case of Maria Corina Machado (2025) – The “Democratic” Peace Masquerade

Giving the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado takes this tradition of geopolitical cynicism to a whole new level. The Norwegian Committee’s official praise for her “tireless work in promoting the democratic rights of the Venezuelan people” spins a clean, media-friendly tale that intentionally hides a much uglier truth. If you actually look at Machado’s political history, you find a steady record of pushing for coercive measures that have caused immense suffering for the Venezuelans she claims to be helping.

Her advocacy reads like a playbook for escalation: she has openly and repeatedly supported sweeping international economic sanctions that, according to research from the Center for Latin American Economic Studies, directly led to over 100,000 deaths in Venezuela from shortages of medicine, food, and essential medical supplies. She hasn’t shied away from calling for external military pressure on the Venezuelan government, sometimes coming dangerously close to endorsing a full-blown armed intervention. On top of that, she actively promoted and organized the violent 2014 and 2017 “guarimbas”—what started as street barricades but turned into paramilitary-style operations. The Venezuelan Public Ministry reported these resulted in 43 deaths, more than 800 injured, and massive damage to public infrastructure like schools, hospitals, and public transit. Let’s call these what they were: not peaceful protests, but acts of urban warfare that sowed terror in communities.

This habit of siding with hardline geopolitical interests is perfectly captured by her full-throated support for Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Machado has openly praised Netanyahu as “a necessary bulwark against terrorism and a key ally for democracy in a troubled region.” This endorsement, coming amid Israel’s ongoing military campaigns and settlement expansions, places Machado squarely in a camp that sees military dominance and unilateral force as acceptable political tools—a position that fundamentally clashes with the international law and diplomatic conflict resolution the Nobel Prize is meant to represent.

The award ceremony in Oslo ripped away any remaining pretense about the prize’s real purpose. In a moment of pure ideological transparency, Machado didn’t dedicate the award to the Venezuelan people, but to U.S. President Donald Trump, stating: “today more than ever we count on President Trump, whose commitment to democracy in Venezuela is unbreakable.” This statement, made while U.S. naval forces were deployed in the Caribbean and economic warfare was intensifying, laid the truth bare. The Nobel Prize wasn’t celebrating a peacemaker; it was crowning a dependable geopolitical asset, putting a respectable face on a regime-change agenda disguised as peace and democracy.

 The Long Tradition of Geopolitical Manipulation

The Machado award isn’t some strange exception—it’s the natural endpoint of a historical pattern that’s been polished for over a century. The Nobel Committee has an impressive track record of honoring people who have engineered violence, as long as that violence ultimately served, or was later forgiven by, Western interests.

• Theodore Roosevelt (1906): He got the prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War, but at the very same time, he promoted the “big stick diplomacy.” As historian Howard Zinn pointed out, “Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize while sending marines to Central America and the Caribbean on sixteen different occasions.” This is a classic case of rewarding a leader for managing imperial disputes while he was busy building an empire.
• Henry Kissinger (1973): This might be the most notorious case. Kissinger got the prize jointly with Le Duc Tho for the Paris Peace Accords on Vietnam. Le Duc Tho, showing a moral posture, refused the prize, seeing it for the sham it was. Kissinger, on the other hand, was directly responsible for the secret, illegal bombing of Cambodia that killed hundreds of thousands and was a mastermind behind Operation Condor, the campaign of state terror and assassination across Latin America. The prize’s real job was to sanitize a man whose name is the embodiment of Western realpolitik and mass human suffering.
• Menachem Begin (1978): Honored alongside Anwar Sadat for the Camp David Accords, Begin had a past the Committee conveniently ignored: he was the former commander of the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary group that the British authorities labeled a terrorist organization and which carried out the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948. As Israel’s Prime Minister, he would later order the 1982 invasion of Lebanon that led to the Sabra and Shatila massacres. The prize effectively gave a militant a makeover, rewriting history to push a narrative of reconciliation.
• Barack Obama (2009): Awarded just months into his presidency based on “promise” rather than anything he’d actually done, Obama mastered the art of waging war while flying the flag of peace. His administration turned drone warfare into a standard practice, which the Bureau of Investigative Journalism says caused over 3,000 civilian deaths, including 500 children. So the “Nobel Peace Prize laureate” became the president who authorized military operations in seven countries..

How the Manipulation Works

Looking at the María Corina Machado case lets us break down the specific tricks used to turn the Nobel Peace Prize into a weapon in the 21st century.

1.  Creating a Fake Narrative: The Committee and its media friends build a clean, polished version of the winner’s story, systematically wiping away any uncomfortable facts. Machado’s calls for foreign intervention and her part in violent unrest are simply forgotten, replaced with the empty label of “democracy activist.” As our friend the Mexican researcher Ana Esther Ceceña puts it, “Submission to the imperial order is rewarded while sovereign resistance is punished.”

2.  The Geopolitical Double Standard: This is the most predictable part of the prize’s history. While Machado gets a celebration, human rights defenders and peace activists from Palestine, Western Sahara, or Cuba are consistently overlooked. The takeaway is obvious: the only dissent that counts is the kind that helps hegemonic power.

3.  Timing it with Aggression: The award never happens in isolation. Machado’s prize came right when pressure on Venezuela was being deliberately cranked up: the US Southern Fleet was sailing into Venezuelan waters, joint military exercises were happening, and economic sanctions—which UN human rights experts have called a form of “collective punishment against the civilian population”—were being tightened. So the prize becomes a political weapon in a larger hybrid war, used to make the aggressor look morally justified and to demonize the target country’s inevitable defensive moves.

The Nobel as a Weapon in Modern Hybrid Warfare

In today’s world, the Nobel Peace Prize has graduated from being just a legitimacy-builder to an active weapon in the hybrid warfare toolkit. It’s a psychological and informational tool built to achieve strategic goals.

• The award’s prestige is used to smuggle in and normalize interventionist agendas, disguising geopolitical power grabs as noble humanitarian missions.
• The ceremony in Oslo is a purification ritual, turning belligerent figures into respected states people overnight, cleaning up their records and handing them a platform nobody can easily challenge.
• By rewarding people who openly call for foreign intervention, the Nobel Committee practically disregards the core principles of the UN Charter: national sovereignty and non-interference in other countries’ affairs. It pushes a dangerous idea of “sovereignty for me, but not for you.”
• The prize claims for the West the exclusive right to define what peace, justice, and democracy mean for everyone on the planet. It’s a form of intellectual violence that shuts down different visions of how the world should work, especially those coming from the Global South.

What a Real, Liberating Peace Would Actually Look Like

The authentic peace Alfred Nobel might have dreamed of can’t be found in the cynical performance playing out in Oslo. True peace isn’t just the absence of war; it’s the active presence of justice. It’s a radical idea that demands tearing down oppressive systems, respecting national sovereignty, and building a multipolar world where different civilizational models can co-exist. Giving the prize to Machado, just like giving it to Kissinger, Obama, and others, only takes us further away from that goal.

Confronted with this institutionalized charade, the people of the Global South have no choice but to tear apart this hegemonic story and create our own definitions of peace. It has to be a peace grounded in anti-imperialism, social justice, and dignity—a peace that understands, as Fidel Castro argued, that “Peace is not simply the absence of war; peace is the right to be free, to be sovereign, not to be aggressed, blockaded or threatened.” The fight for a real peace is therefore tied directly to the fight against the very hegemony that wears white while never dropping the sword. The Nobel Peace Prize, as it exists today, remains one of its most effective disguises precisely because it’s one of the most dishonest.

Pedro Monzon is a former Cuban Ambassador in Australia and Consul General in Sao Paolo. He is now a researcher at Cuba's Center for International Policy Research (CIPI). He has a column at al Mayadeen.

Bibliography

• Abrams, I. (1988). The Nobel Peace Prize and the Laureates: An Illustrated Biographical History, 1901-1987. G. K. Hall & Co.
• Lundestad, G. (2001).  The Nobel Peace Prize, 1901-200. The Norwegian Nobel Institute.
• García, J. A. (2020). “Soft Power y Premios Internacionales: El Nobel de la Paz como Instrumento Geopolítico”. Revista de Estudios Globales, 12(3), 45-67.
• Weisbrot, M. & Sachs, J. (2019). Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela. Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
• UN Human Rights Council (2020). Report on the Impact of Unilateral Coercive Measures on the Enjoyment of Human Rights in Venezuela.
• Golinger, E. (2014). The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela. Pluto Press.
•  Venezuelan Public Ministry (2017).Informe Final: Víctimas de las Guarimbas (2014-2017).
• Chomsky, N. (1999). The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo. Common Courage Press.

• Falk, R. (2017). Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope. Just World Books.
• Machado, M. C. (2023). Discurso en el Foro de la Fundación Heritage. Washington D.C.
• Zinn, H. (1980). A People’s History of the United States. Harper & Row.
• Hitchcock, W. I. (2018). The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s. Simon & Schuster.
• Morris, B. (2004). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge University Press.
• The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (2016). Drone Warfare: Casualty Estimates.
• Cox, R. W. (1981). “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory”. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10(2), 126-155.
• Ceceña, A. E. (2021). El Patrón de la Dominación Geoestratégica en el Siglo XXI. CLACSO.
• Castro, F. (1979). Discurso en la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas. Naciones Unidas.
• Nolan, A. (Ed.). (2019). Economic and Social Rights After the Global Financial Crisis. Cambridge University Press.
• Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) (2019). Report on the Impact of Unilateral Coercive Measures on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
• Freedman, L. (2022). The Future of War: A History. PublicAffairs.
• Galeotti, M. (2022). Hybrid Wars: The 21st-Century’s New Threats. Routledge.