In Malaysia on Sunday, on the sidelines of a summit of Southeast Asian leaders, President Donald Trump presided over a ceremony for the signing of a ceasefire agreement between Thailand and Cambodia. The two countries had already agreed to a ceasefire back in July to end a five-day skirmish, the latest flare-up of a decades-old border dispute. This was an “enhanced” deal that included agreements from both countries to pull back their heavy artillery and allow international monitors. But the reason the ceremony was held probably had more to do with the fact that Trump had demanded it as a condition for attending the summit.
Not surprisingly, Trump again took the opportunity to tout, as he has constantly over the past few months, the “eight wars that my administration has ended in eight months,” adding, “there’s never been anything like that. We’re averaging one a month… It’s like, I shouldn’t say it’s a hobby, because it’s so much more serious, but something I’m good at and something I love to do.” Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet dutifully endorsed Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize at the ceremony.
There’s an old saw that war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography. If nothing else, Trump’s quest for a Peace Prize is having a similar effect, bringing an Oval Office spotlight to some global conflicts that don’t normally rank high in American media coverage.
“I can’t remember the last time an American president has so consistently brought up Thailand and Cambodia, or Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo,” Eurasia Group president and foreign affairs commentator Ian Bremmer wrote recently. Trump himself sometimes seems a little fuzzy on the geography, having claimed at various points to have brought peace to Albania and Azerbaijan and between Cambodia and Armenia. But in Trump’s telling, his ability to quickly strike these agreements is proof that many of the world’s problems are the result of the “stupidity” of his predecessors, and that his own decades of dealmaking make him better qualified to solve these problems than the diplomatic corps he has drastically cut and sidelined.
In fairness, the eight conflicts Trump refers to are real and serious. But a closer look at his claims to have ended them reveals some blatant exaggerations, some genuine but tentative successes, and some head-scratchers. Let’s take his self-proclaimed triumphs one by one.
This is the big one: One of the two globally polarizing wars (along with Russia and Ukraine, where there’s been less success in peacemaking) that Trump claims would never have broken out if he had been president and that he vowed to quickly solve. Undoubtedly, Trump’s willingness to apply pressure to Israel and his ability to wrangle Arab allies to pressure Hamas was critical in reaching the ceasefire and hostage release deal that went into effect in mid-October.
But it’s also worth remembering that there was already a ceasefire in place when Trump took office in January, one that lasted until March when Israel resumed airstrikes and halted aid into Gaza with Trump’s blessing. Whether this latest ceasefire lasts could depend on Trump’s willingness to remain engaged on the issue.
The “12-day war” ended in June when Trump announced a ceasefire on social media, seemingly taking the Israeli government by surprise. Trump’s diplomatic pressure and very public frustration probably did help the ceasefire hold. On the other hand, Trump had backed the Israeli airstrikes, effectively abandoning his own diplomatic effort to address Iran’s nuclear program, and the US joined the war by bombing Iranian nuclear sites. This was more of a unilateral declaration of victory by one of the combatants than a mediation that ended the fighting.
This is a century-old border dispute that has become more heated since 2008, when Cambodia tried to register a temple in the disputed area as a UNESCO world heritage site. The two sides have repeatedly fought skirmishes over the years. The most recent, over the summer, killed at least 33 people and displaced thousands.
Trump played a role in ending the flare-up by threatening both countries that he would not negotiate a trade and tariff deal with them until the fighting stopped. By all accounts, this played a key role in getting Thailand to agree to mediated talks, which it had been previously resisting. Those talks were mediated by Malaysia, and China also applied pressure, but Trump can fairly claim to have been an important part of the deal.
When simmering tensions between India and Pakistan over a grisly terrorist attack in the disputed region of Kashmir boiled over into all-out war in May, the Trump administration initially refrained from getting involved, with Vice President JD Vance describing it as “fundamentally none of our business.” But, likely due to concerns about potential nuclear weapons use, that stance shifted, and administration officials worked the phones in an effort to bring an end to the four-day conflict.
Pakistan’s government has given Trump full credit for the deal and nominated him for a Nobel, earning the country’s military leader Asim Munir an unusual White House visit. But India has disputed the characterization that they called off their military offensive under pressure from Trump. Trump’s choice to announce the deal himself on Truth Social also likely rankled New Delhi. It does appear the US played a role in mediating this conflict, as it has in previous India-Pakistan flare-ups. But it’s safe to assume this won’t be the last time the two bitter rivals exchange fire over their border.
Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo
On June 27, the two Central African neighbors signed a peace deal at the White House aiming to end months of fighting that had killed thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands. This was the latest phase in a complex series of civil wars and interventions in Congo dating back to the spillover of violence into the DRC from the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Under the June deal, the two agreed to respect each other’s territorial integrity and refrain from backing armed groups. They also agreed to a framework for a minerals deal backed by possible US investment.
All this was welcome. The problem is that the M23 rebels — the Rwandan-backed group involved in most of the fighting with the Congolese military — didn’t recognize the deal and have continued fighting. In some places the violence has even intensified.
This is a real diplomatic breakthrough, but not the end of a war. The two Caucasus neighbors had been in a state of alternating hot and cold war since the collapse of the Soviet Union, mainly over the status of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave entirely surrounded by Azerbaijan. In 2020, the two fought a 44-day war that ended in complete victory for Azerbaijan. In 2023, Azerbaijan launched a new blockade resulting in the capitulation of Nagorno-Karabakh’s local authorities and the expulsion of nearly its entire Armenian population.
At a White House meeting Trump hosted in August, the two countries’ leaders agreed to normalize diplomatic relations after nearly 30 years of fighting. Trump was in a good position to do this, because neither side wanted Russia, the traditional regional power, involved. Observers noted at the time that the thaw between the two countries is fragile, but generally gave Trump credit for making the diplomatic breakthrough possible. Still: The actual “war” was over before Trump took office.
Trump has credited himself on Truth Social for “keeping Peace between Egypt and Ethiopia.” This is a case where it’s not really clear what he is talking about. During his first term, the US was involved in efforts to mediate a dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia over the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Africa’s largest hydroelectric dam, which Egypt feared could be used to divert the Nile River that Egypt depends on for its water supply and agriculture. The US-mediated talks ultimately broke down. The dam finally opened in September of this year to strong Egyptian objections. Ethiopian officials have also rejected Trump’s claim that the dam was “stupidly financed by the United States of America.”
Egyptian officials have talked in the past about taking military action to prevent the dam’s completion, and Trump himself said the Egyptians might blow it up, but there’s no indication that Egypt was actually preparing to do that. There’s no agreement between the countries over the management of the water. There was no war here — but there is an active international dispute that Trump has not solved.
Speaking on background, a White House official referred Vox to the president’s “public comments on Egypt/Ethiopia where he discusses this.”
This claim has likewise provoked some confusion, in both the US and the Balkans. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office in June, “I have a friend in Serbia, and he said to me, ‘We’re going to go to war again.’ And I don’t want to mention that it’s Kosovo, but it’s Kosovo. They were going to start a big war, but we stopped it. We stopped it because of trade.”
After a brutal war, Kosovo won its de facto independence from Serbia in 1999, though Serbia still doesn’t recognize it and tensions between the two are ongoing. But there’s no public evidence that the war was about to restart this year. In June, Kosovo’s president said she had “reliable information” that Trump had prevented an escalation of the conflict, but Serbia disputed this.
In his first term, Trump and his envoy Richard Grenell did play a role in helping Serbia and Kosovo reach an economic normalization agreement that was signed at the White House in 2020. The White House official said that Trump’s comments on Serbia-Kosovo were “referring to his first term” — which doesn’t really explain the story about his friend, or his claim to have ended eight wars in the past year.
To be clear, there are worse “hobbies” a president could have than trying to negotiate the ends to some of the world’s deadliest and most complex conflicts. And there are times when Trump’s transactional and unpredictable style has managed to achieve breakthroughs that might not have come about through traditional diplomacy. Trump has now set his sights on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border dispute as well as Sudan’s brutal and intractable civil war, and we should all be wishing him success.
The problem is that Trump’s oversimplification of these conflicts (in some cases, his total mischaracterization of them), his overemphasis on his own efforts, and his tendency to move on to other things once the problem is “solved,” trivialize the issues driving each dispute. His focus on receiving praise for his efforts could make the harder work of addressing the underlying causes of the fighting, in all of these places, harder to resolve.
Trump tends to tout his breakthroughs, even the real ones, not as ceasefires but as the definitive end to years, decades, or even “thousands of years” of conflict. The answer in every one of these cases is, “we’ll see.”
