“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump stated within the message to Norway’s top minister, Jonas Gahr Støre.
Trump has lengthy coveted the Nobel Peace Prize. In his 2d time period as president, he has styled himself as a peacemaker, as his message to Støre demonstrates. However as I’ve discovered from my paintings as a student of Roman historical past and rhetoric, the phrase “peace” can imply one thing solely other when utilized by the ones wielding energy.
Within the 12 months 98 CE, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote, “With lying names they call theft, slaughter, and plunder ‘control,’ and when they make a wasteland, they call it ‘peace.’”
This line, stated of the Romans by means of an enemy of Rome in Tacitus’ paintings “Agricola,” has had a protracted and sundry afterlife amongst the ones commenting on imperialism.
Just about 2,000 years after Tacitus’ time, U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy used the word in a 1968 speech wondering the U.S. struggle in Vietnam; the Irish poet Seamus Heaney echoed it in a 1974 poem figuring his place of origin’s centuries of desolation; extra just lately nonetheless, the HBO collection “Succession” remodeled the phrases right into a critique of the display’s despotic central personality.
The citation has had endurance as it cuts to the core of the way communicate of peace can be utilized as a device of struggle and gear acquisition.
On the one-year mark of the second one Trump management, those phrases from two millennia in the past talk as presciently as ever.
Over and over again during the last 12 months, Trump has branded acts of struggle with the language of peace. Extra widely, his management’s power styling of Trump as a “President of Peace” and his steady claims of entitlement to the Nobel Peace Prize have moved in tandem with a rising time table of army aggression, each international and home.
‘War is peace’
The Altar of Augustan Peace, devoted by means of the Roman emperor Augustus in 9 BCE after his victories in civil and international wars.
Andrea Jemolo, Electa / Mondadori Portfolio by way of Getty Pictures
Tacitus, who lived from c. 55 to c. 120 CE, puts his critique of Roman imperial rhetoric into the mouth of Calgacus, the in all probability fictionalized leader of the Caledonians in northern Britain. The phrases, delivered in a speech prior to the Combat of Mons Graupius in 83 CE, expected what was once to return: a crushing Roman victory and the devastation of the Caledonian other people.
Calgacus’ aphorism will get at one thing elementary about Roman imperial propaganda, which offered the cessation of struggle – on their phrases – as “peace.” A bodily illustration of that is the Altar of Augustan Peace, from 9 BCE, which was once constructed after the warlord Augustus’ victories in international and civil wars. A reconstruction of one of the crucial monument’s friezes contains the personified goddess Roma sitting atop struggle spoils. Peace for Rome was once tantamount to victory for Rome – or, as on this case, for one in every of Rome’s strongmen.
And whilst Tacitus, an achieved Roman baby-kisser and provincial governor, was once himself no opponent of Roman imperialism, it’s vital that he crafts a speech for an enemy of Rome that provides the misinform the Roman rhetoric of peace. The non-Roman’s viewpoint on Romans’ “lying names” cuts throughout the posturing of the imperialist.
Calgacus’ critique thus places into aid the jarring juxtapositions the sector has noticed and heard from Trump during the last 12 months.
On Dec. 31, 2025, Trump declared that his New Yr’s answer for 2026 was once “peace on Earth.” 3 days later, he invaded Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, an army motion that left 100 useless and a humanitarian disaster looming. Except for claiming regulate of a few $2.5 billion of Venezuela’s oil reserves, Trump has equipped few information about how he’ll individually “run the country.”
A in a similar way hanging disconnect between rhetoric and truth got here previous in 2025 with the U.S.’s June 21 bombing of Iran, which the White Area X account celebrated with the declaration “CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!” Some seven months later, because the Iranian regime violently suppresses large protests, Trump is weighing further acts of struggle, pronouncing that “the military is looking at it and we’re looking at some strong options.”
In Gaza, Trump is chairing a “Board of Peace” to supervise the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and to put into effect a brand new executive. The Israel/Hamas Conflict is one in every of 8 wars Trump claims credit score for finishing.
As with the seven different instances, the declare to have introduced peace in Gaza lacks substantiation.
From the announcement of the ceasefire on Oct. 10, 2025, thru Dec. 30, 2025, 414 Palestinians had been killed and 1,145 injured by means of Israeli assaults. This is, the struggle rages on.
U.S. President Donald Trump receives the FIFA Peace Prize from Italian FIFA President Gianni Infantino in Washington, DC, on December 5, 2025.
Saul Loeb/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
Now Trump, it seems that out of resentment at now not being award the Nobel, announces that he’ll clutch Greenland “one way or the other” and that Cuba will have to settle for his phrases on Venezuelan oil shipments “before it is too late.”
At house, Trump ramps up the presence of ICE, whose violent solution to enforcement has had fatal penalties for 32 other people in custody and one girl protester.
All this as FIFA, the world governing frame for football, awards Trump its first-ever Peace Prize; and as he stamps his identify on – after defunding – the usInstitute of Peace.
Unfold of ‘peace’ rhetoric
Lately’s dizzying clashes in phrase and deed are illuminated by means of Calgacus’ searing phrases, which display how simply the rhetoric of peace can be utilized to hide for or distract from acts of struggle.
On the similar time, Tacitus issues readers to the superiority and thus the normalization and commonness of this rhetoric, which is able to grow to be an inseparable corollary of a program of constructing struggle.
Certainly, Tacitus gifts identical indictments of Roman imperial rhetoric two times in different places in his writing, once more from the views of the ones threatened by means of Rome.
For each the Batavians, of modern day Netherlands, within the “Histories” and some other team of Britons within the “Annals,” the good risk to their peoples is Roman “peace.”
