The US president’s push for the award captures the spirit of our age In the early 1980s, former US President Jimmy Carter visited Stockholm. At a reception he approached Stig Ramel, the long-serving executive director of the Nobel Foundation, and asked with some bitterness why he had not received the Peace Prize for brokering the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. “If I had been awarded it, I might have been re-elected for a second term,” Carter remarked. He had lost to Ronald Reagan