During a dinner at the White House on Monday night, President Donald Trump and visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a victory lap to hail their recent joint strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities as an unmitigated success.
"He's forging peace as we speak, one country and one region after the other," Netanyahu said, referring to Trump – and presenting a nominating letter he said he sent the Nobel committee.
As The Associated Press notes, the call for the peace prize comes after the Israeli leader for years had pressed Trump and his predecessors to take military action against Iran's nuclear program.
Ambassador Huckabee, who was present at the gathering, praised the president for his decision to take out the nukes.
"When the B-2s went in, the celebration [and] the sense of partnership that you gave with the Israeli people was so dramatic," Huckabee told those in attendance. "But the message was bigger than to Israel – it was a message to the world."
That message? "America's friends can trust us, but America's foes had better fear us," the ambassador stated.
"That is a message that the president sent to everyone on the planet, and it is a message that will resonate toward a matter of peace the likes of which I don't think we've ever seen."
Trump told reporters at the dinner that Iranian officials have reached out to the U.S. to schedule talks about Iran's nuclear program. But Tehran has yet to confirm that it has agreed to restart talks with the U.S.
Prospects for a Prize?
Trump has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize by people within the U.S. as well as politicians abroad – but that's only one small step in the secretive process.
Nominations can be made by a select group of people and organizations, including heads of state or politicians serving at a national level, university professors, directors of foreign policy institutes, past Nobel Prize recipients and members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee itself.
Once all nominations have come in, the committee – made up of five members appointed by the Norwegian parliament – sifts through them and ensures they were made by an eligible nominator. The nominations are not announced by the committee, and the Nobel statutes prohibit the judges from discussing their deliberations for 50 years.
Four former U.S. presidents have won the award. Barack Obama won the peace prize in 2009, barely nine months into his first term. It was met with fierce criticism in the U.S., where many argued Obama had not been in office long enough to have an impact worthy of the Nobel.
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for work he did after leaving the White House. Woodrow Wilson received the Nobel Prize in 1919, as did Theodore Roosevelt in 1906.
Associated Press contributed to this article.
