President Trump on Friday said that he has stopped even more wars than he claimed to earlier this week, if the tally also includes “pre-wars.”
“I settled seven wars, and actually if you think about pre-wars, add three more so it would be 10,” Trump said in the White House when asked about the ongoing war in Ukraine, which continues despite his recent summits with Vladimir Putin and European leaders to end the conflict.
“I thought this would be in the middle of the pack in terms of difficulty,” Trump continued. “Now I’m not happy about anything about that war. Nothing. Not happy at all. We’ll see what happens. Over the next two weeks we’re going to find out which way it’s going to go.”
Earlier this week, the president had put the figure at “six wars in six months” in a post on Truth Social. It was an apparent reference to diplomacy around disputes between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, Iran and Israel, India and Pakistan, Cambodia and Thailand, and Ethiopia and Egypt.
The following day, the president upped the tally again, telling Fox & Friends he had “solved seven wars.”
The Independent has contacted the White House for comment.
The president has long angled for a Nobel Peace Prize, and has claimed his diplomatic efforts towards conflicts in disputed Kashmir, Gaza, and Ukraine should be seen as historic.
He has also complained about his predecessor, Barack Obama, receiving the Nobel.
“If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds,” Trump told the Detroit Economic Club last year.
This July, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nominated Trump for the peace prize.
However, when it comes to the Ukraine war, perhaps the conflict the president has invested most political capital towards solving, progress remains stalled.
On the campaign trail, Trump said he could solve the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours, though he later claimed he was being “a little bit sarcastic.”
More recent efforts, including talks with Vladimir Putin in Alaska last week and European leaders at the White House earlier this week, have yielded similar big promises and eventual walk-backs.
The president spoke of quickly arranging bilateral and trilateral talks between Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S. over the war, only for the White House to say this week, “It is not in the national interest to further negotiate these issues publicly.”
The Trump administration also went into the White House talks claiming Russia would accept NATO-style, Western-backed security guarantees for Ukraine, only for Russia to pour cold water on the proposal.
