US President Donald Trump has reiterated his claim of brokering peace between India and Pakistan, asserting that he deserves the Nobel Prize for “ending seven wars” through trade diplomacy.
Speaking at the American Cornerstone Institute Founder’s Dinner on Saturday, Trump said, “We stopped wars between India and Pakistan, Thailand and Cambodia. Think of India and Pakistan… I stopped that with trade. They want to trade. And I have great respect for both leaders.”
He further listed other conflicts he claimed to have influenced, including disputes in Armenia-Azerbaijan, Kosovo-Serbia, Israel-Iran, Egypt-Ethiopia, and Rwanda-Congo. According to Trump, “60 per cent of them were stopped because of trade.”
Linking his approach to nuclear deterrence, Trump added, “Like with India, I said, ‘We’re not going to do trade if you’re going to fight and you have nuclear weapons.’ They stopped.”
On the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump maintained that the conflict would never have erupted if he had been president. He also insisted it could still earn him a Nobel Prize, declaring, “I stopped seven wars. That’s one war, and that’s a big one.”
The former president also expressed disappointment with Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he had “let him down” by not halting the war. Trump argued that Russian soldiers are dying at a higher rate than Ukrainians and stressed that energy policies, particularly oil drilling, could play a decisive role in ending the war.
Despite claiming to have had a good personal rapport with Putin, Trump conceded that the Russia-Ukraine conflict proved harder to resolve than expected. He asserted, however, that during his presidency the war “did not happen, nor was it close to happening.”
The ongoing war, which began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and escalated into a full-scale invasion in February 2022, continues with Ukrainian counteroffensives and Russian advances in Donetsk and Luhansk.
