The Price of Peace: How Trump Is Turning Wars and Settlements Into Business Deals

Why would a victor today need to loot cities, haul away machinery and demand gold when, in the 21st century, it is possible to obtain oil fields for a hundred years, a transport corridor for nearly a century, and a share of all future revenues from the natural resources of the “defeated” side? The Nobel Peace Prize Candidate Donald Trump very much wanted to become the president of peace. He wanted it so badly that throughout almost the entire first year of his second term, he regularly reminded humanity that he was the one ending wars, the one capable of reaching deals where everyone else had spent decades merely talking, and that, for some reason, his name was still missing from the list of Nobel Peace Prize laureates. Even before returning to the White House, he had promised to end the Russian-Ukrainian war within 24 hours. It later turned out that the 24 hours had been said somewhat “sarcastically.” But another calculation soon emerged: Trump claimed that he had stopped eight wars and therefore that the Nobel Prize was practically obliged to find its way to the White House. When it did not, the US president wrote an astonishingly candid letter to the prime minister of Norway in January 2026. Since he had not been given the Nobel Peace Prize for ending “eight wars plus,” he said he no longer felt obliged to think exclusively about peace. Forty days later, on February 28, the war between the United States and Israel and Iran began. Sometimes history has a sense of humor that no satirist could improve upon.