Nobel Prize dovetails with US war plans
Venezuelan Far Right opposition leader given Nobel Peace Prize as the US builds up its naval attack forces in the Caribbean.
The Nobel Peace Prize has been ridiculed by critics for years, who rightly see it as an instrument of Western soft power, with a history of recognising dubious characters for their supposed achievements in the cause of peace and humanity.
Whether it be National Endowment for Democracy-backed (NED) journalist Maria Ressa spreading liberal values in the Philippines in 2021 or the optics of US President Barack Obama conducting the War on Terror more progressively in 2009, the prize has served as a means of inculcating the public with a moral narrative about what came before. The Nobel Committee, established in Norway in 1897, began bestowing awards in 1901.
This year however, the prize took on a decisively more sinister function, serving as a propaganda foil for hard power, a means of preparing Western populations for what may be about to come, namely a US war against Venezuela.
US naval assets continue to build around the Caribbean, which now include four destroyers and one nuclear-powered attack submarine. The United States has bombed several vessels it alleged were smuggling drugs off the coast of Venezuela in recent weeks, after it accused Maduro’s government of being a narco-terrorist regime.
The moves suggest preparations are well underway to commit an act of aggression and initiate a regime change operation.
On Saturday (NZT), it was announced Far Right Venezuelan opposition figure Maria Corina Machado won the 2025 Nobel prize, a woman who has repeatedly called for US intervention in her country to depose elected President Nicolas Maduro. It is hard to believe the Nobel announcement was a coincidence.
“When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,” the Nobel Committee said in its citation.
The prize elevates Machado’s voice and will serve to give the former deputy of the National Assembly of Venezuela a semblance of gravitas when she inevitably backs any acts of US aggression. In Orwellian fashion, the instrumentalisation of the Nobel Prize means peace is war.
In one of the more memorable plays for Western intervention, Machado in December 2018 sent a letter to Argentina’s then President Mauricio Macri and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, requesting they support efforts to get the UN Security Council to adopt “effective measures to protect Venezuela by promoting regime change, a measure that necessarily entails strengthening international security”.
Machado, a staunch backer of Israel, promised Netanyahu co-operation and strengthening of ties between the two countries.
US regime-change activities have been ongoing against Maduro since he came to power in 2013, replacing deceased president Hugo Chavez.
Chavez had led a popular ‘Bolivarian’ revolution of socialist reforms that involved the nationalisation of the country’s natural resources, including gaining majority stakes in its massive oil fields, a legacy Maduro strived to protect and expand upon, amid crippling US sanctions and internal agitation by Western-sponsored civil society groups and individuals like Machado.
Using organisations like The Organisation of American States (OAS), the US and its Western allies have waged a sustained campaign of delegitimising Maduro and his government, while seeking opportunities to oust him.
In September 2018, the New York Times reported the Trump administration had conducted secret meetings with military officers in Venezuela to discuss overthrowing Maduro. That followed a failed assassination attempt on Maduro, using a suicide drone the month before.
Trump told media in 2023 that Venezuela “was ready to collapse” when he ended his first term in January 2021. “We would have taken it over and we would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door,” he said.
In 2019, National Assembly opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, declared himself interim president of the country after accusing Maduro of attempting to usurp the constitution with his efforts to create another layer of democratic participation, in the form of a new ‘constituent assembly’.
He wasted no time urging the military to lead a coup against Maduro, an unlikely prospect given its loyalty to the government since elements close to Chavez reversed a short US-backed coup in April 2003. Guaidó’s abject failure to act as a lightning rod for discontent saw him eventually exiled to Miami.
Maduro’s presidential election win in 2024 was disputed by the opposition, with the collective West again refusing to recognise him as the country’s legitimate leader, a diplomatic position that left his government more vulnerable to a US military attempt at regime-change. Maduro himself had a US$15 million bounty placed on his head in August by Washington.
His United Socialist Party (PSUV) won landslide victories in this year’s regional and Parliamentary election results, disputed by right-wing opposition parties, which have strategically boycotted elections, claiming fraudulent counts.
It is clear Machado will continue to present these arguments as justifications for US intervention.
However, there is a possibility such aggression will serve to reveal the Nobel Prize Committee as a mere propaganda tool of naked Western power, in the similar manner by which the genocide in Gaza has exposed the West’s professed commitment to genuine multilateralism and human rights as ideological cover for imperial hegemonic dominance.
Shaping and managing Western public perception is now more difficult in light of Gaza and two years of genocide denial and obfuscation by media and political elites. There is as sense of heightened distrust and awareness that Western politicians and media present lies and distortions to justify US political violence.
What should be of concern however, is the powerlessness to assert democratic control over US foreign policy, both within the US and within the states that ally with its rules-based order.
That situation is made more fraught due to Western foreign policy arguably becoming informed, not just by the cold, calculated strategic pursuit of dominance and containment of competitors, but also by the intellectual and emotional derangement of political elites, as they back genocide and prepare for catastrophic war with leading nations in a new world of multipolarity.
One of the more disturbing aspects of Machado’s prize was the choreographed manner in which Machado’s prize was announced, where this type of derangement seemed evident.
A clip widely disseminated on social media and across news platforms showed an emotional Secretary of the Nobel Committee, Kristian Berg Harpviken, phoning Machado minutes before a public announcement.
Harpviken’s voice faltered and his bottom lip quivered, as he struggled not to cry when informing her in English of the Committee’s decision. His sentimentality betrayed a break from reality shared by much of Europe’s ruling class, blinded by its perceived political and cultural superiority to barbarous autocracies across the world.
That Harpviken was talking to an extremist advocating an act of aggression against her own nation, by a resource-hungry hegemon lurking in the Caribbean with 10 percent of its naval assets, didn’t seem to register.
“Oh my God… I have no words,” Machado replied to him. “I thank you so much, but I hope you understand this is a movement, this is an achievement of a whole society. I am just one person. I certainly do not deserve it.”
It also seems highly unlikely Harpviken would have rang Machado in the middle of her night, in front of a camera, if she had not been there expecting the call. The clip will likely be studied by future generations in the same way sociologists study crude war propaganda films made by German Nazis.
Although Machado dedicated her prize to Trump, her sycophancy didn’t stop the grandiose narcissist, through a White House spokesperson, accusing the Norwegian committee of “putting politics over peace” by focusing on Venezuela.
Days before, Trump had announced a breakthrough in talks between Israel and Hamas, a development that would have come too late in the day for the Committee to consider any nominations for Trump’s neo-colonial ‘peace’ plan for Gaza. The development was likely inconsequential for neo-cons in his administration.
US Secretary of state Marco Rubio had nominated Machado for the prize in August last year, alongside other long-term proponents of Venezuelan regime change in Congress, only too aware of her propaganda value in any plan to destroy Venezuela’s sovereignty.
The Nobel Peace Prize has long been another tool used to promote the "superiority" of a particular (western) narrative. I am not sure what i think of this. Is it a new low? Is the "peace" prize being used to promote the justification of a future conflict that will create anything but peace?
Thank you for shining a light on this Mick. Your work exposing these shams to us in the West is vital. Past time for us to stop buying into the Nobel Peace prize.