The Nobel road to peace

Though Donald Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize on four occasions over the years his supposed efforts to promote peace and resolve global conflicts have, so far, failed to impress the Nobel Peace Committee.
This rubbishy prize, with a few honourable exceptions, has long been the preserve of imperialist politicians and prominent agents of imperialism. The anti-communist Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov won it in 1975. The reactionary Polish union leader Lech Walesa got it for his counter-revolutionary campaign in 1983. Gorbachov was similarly rewarded for his treachery in 1990. And a prominent Chinese anti-communist writer, Liu Xiaobo, got his Nobel for "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China”. 
Bizarrely enough the European Union was collectively awarded this glittering prize in 2012 for contributing “to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”.
Needless to say the Dalai Lama is on the list of winners together with Henry Kissinger, who was jointly given the prize together with the chief north Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho in 1973 for negotiating the Vietnamese peace accord. Comrade Le, the only communist ever to get this accolade, took the principled stand and refused to accept the prize on the grounds that the war in Vietnam was still raging.
But Trump may be lucky this time round. His efforts to end Joe Biden’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine have soon borne fruit with a positive response from the Kremlin and a summit with Vladimir Putin in Saudi Arabia in the offing.
The Russians have made it clear that they want international recognition of the autonomous republic of Crimea’s accession to the Russian Federation. They intend, one way or another, to liberate all the territories of the two Donbas people’s republics that have joined the Russian Federation as well as the two former southern Ukrainian provinces that have also been liberated. They want equal rights for all the remaining members of the Russian community in Ukraine and a guarantee of permament Ukrainian neutrality.
The Trump team are talking about a standstill cease-fire but offering the Russians what they’ve already got is not the most generous opening gambit. It’s nevertheless a start. 
However Trump’s people do seem to accept the justice of some of the Russian claims while outlining their own demands for exclusive American exploitation of Ukraine’s priceless rare earths and other mineral deposits after the end of the fighting.
Though only Trump and Putin can set the seal on a deal to end the war most of the hard bargaining will have already been resolved before they meet in the secret talks between their envoys that are already preparing the terms of a settlement. 
Secret diplomacy, that has sadly became the norm since the end of the Cold War, is rarely the best pathway to peace. But both the Russian and American sides are clearly working towards a win-win agreement that ends the war – and that clearly will be in the benefit of the Ukrainian and Russian people. Perhaps Trump will get his Nobel afterall...who knows, maybe Putin too!