The Nobel Committee has something of a fetish for awarding the Peace Prize to centre-Left American politicians, regardless of merit. At least former president Jimmy Carter had involved himself in decades of peace initiatives, however futile most proved to be, when he received the prize in 2002. Former Vice President Al Gore, on the other hand, won the 2005 prize for his celebrity endorsement of climate-change doom-mongering.

In Barack Obama’s case in 2009, the rationale was weaker still: he had not even been in office a year and had achieved virtually nothing for the cause of peace during that time. But he was a symbol of hope to centre-Left types around the world, who could not yet imagine the anarchy he would bring to Libya or the ceaseless wars he would wage with drones.

This year’s prize should go to an American leader who for once has earned it: Donald Trump. But will the Nobel Committee free itself from its ideological straitjacket to give it to him? President Trump is everything that Obama was not. He is a man of the Right rather than the Left. He is brash and intensely disliked by much of world opinion, especially elite opinion. Obama had a soft touch and was loved almost as greatly as Trump is despised. Yet the only thing that should matter is what Trump has achieved, in contrast to what Obama did not.