Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor and a foreign affairs columnist at POLITICO Europe.

The Nobel Peace Prize that U.S. President Donald Trump so openly covets seems to be disappearing into the elusive horizon — and not just because the award’s Norwegian judges will likely be unsympathetic to his claim for eligibility.

Trump likes to be lauded as the peacemaker-in-chief — something his cabinet members cravenly comply with. Meanwhile, fearful of losing federal funding, GOP lawmakers, U.S. corporate leaders, state governors and university deans are falling over themselves to do his bidding — much as EU leaders do too.

However, the two men who could advance his Nobel claim the most — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin — are being adamantly obstructive, declining to end the bloodiest of the world’s current wars, as their own political interests are served by waging them.

Netanyahu and Putin are, in effect, thumbing their noses at the U.S. president. Going their own merry way, they’re no doubt convinced they can either lure him into their way of thinking, or that he’ll continue to be a TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) president.

Back in July, Netanyahu had sought to curry favor with Trump by joining four other national leaders in recommending him for the prize, adding to the stampeding crowd of U.S. lawmakers nominating him. But since then, the Israeli leader hasn’t been playing ball.

He’s persisted with a military offensive in Gaza, accompanied by an Israeli-engineered famine, which has prompted France, Britain and several other countries to announce they’ll formally back Palestinian statehood at the U.N. General Assembly next month.

Still, over the weekend, Trump was optimistically talking up the prospects of striking an agreement, saying Israel had accepted his terms for a hostage deal to end the war. As Israeli officials pointedly highlighted, though, Netanyahu was yet to hold a cabinet meeting to discuss the latest peace framework. Moreover, he was quite unlikely to defy political partners in his far-right governing coalition, who see this as the moment to redeem their dream of a greater Israel that restores the biblical lands of the Jews and are in no mood to end the campaign in Gaza.

And midweek, the Israeli leader appeared to wreck, or at the very least dim, the chances of a U.S.-brokered Gaza peace deal by launching an audacious, albeit unsuccessful, airstrike on Qatar — a U.S. ally that went out of its way to laud Trump when he made an official visit this spring to Doha. During the visit, the country also announced a $1.2 trillion commitment to generate economic exchanges with the U.S.

Adding insult to injury, Hamas leaders — including the militant group’s former political chief Khaled Mashal, chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya, and West Bank chief Zaher Jabarin — were gathering in Qatar to discuss the peace deal’s latest draft, which was recently recrafted by Trump’s golfing buddy turned U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff. Israel claimed the strike was in retaliation for a gun attack in Jerusalem that saw six Israelis killed and another eight injured, but it was clearly in planning for months.

Trump has since publicly rebuked Israel for the Qatar airstrike, but that doesn’t seem to be deterring a willful Netanyahu: After what U.S. officials described as a heated phone call between Trump and the Israeli leader, an unrepentant Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz vowed to continue attacks on “enemies everywhere.”

As Netanyahu continues to bomb Palestinian territories and fails to restrain far-right settlers from running amok in the West Bank — which they want Israel to annex — he isn’t the only one throwing up obstacles in Trump’s path. Putin’s lack of any real interest in actually ending his war on Ukraine was underlined this week too.

Since his summit meeting with Trump in Alaska, where the U.S. president let his demand for an immediate ceasefire slide, Putin has escalated the conflict on every front. The Russian leader hasn’t reciprocated Trump’s concession in any way— in fact, quite the reverse.

Demonstrating a nonchalance about Trump’s occasional threats, Putin’s been seeking to frame Ukraine as the obstacle to peace. The Russian leader remains convinced that time is on Moscow’s side, and that Russia’s military superiority over Ukraine is only growing as Kyiv struggles to mobilize the manpower it needs to defend its frontlines from Russian assaults.

Since Putin departed Anchorage, Russia has mounted ever larger drone and missile strikes on Ukraine and targeted major government buildings in Kyiv for the first time since the war began. The attack on the Ukrainian prime minister’s office came just two weeks after another Trump envoy, Keith Kellogg, visited the city. And as Kellogg noted online: “The attack was not a signal that Russia wants to diplomatically end this war.” Still, his boss seems inclined to pursue peace by diplomatic means.

And in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Russia went even further, thumbing its nose at NATO with an aerial incursion into Poland’s airspace, sending 19 drones across the border via ally Belarus. It appears the Poles, with assistance from NATO allies, only managed to shoot down three of them — a poor 15 percent interception rate, which highlights NATO’s air defense weakness on its eastern flank.

Many are viewing the Russian encroachment as a test of the alliance’s resolve, unity and readiness. All that may be true, but it was likely also a test of Trump’s mettle, as well as a warning against the very idea of any significant forward deployment of NATO forces in Poland — or any other so-called frontline countries bordering Ukraine — as part of any post-deal security guarantees for Kyiv.

The Kremlin’s message: They won’t necessarily be safe. And so far, the U.S. president’s reaction to what amounts to a flagrant provocation has been oddly muted.

So, the Nobel Peace Prize? Trump seems more likely to be left holding a wooden spoon.