Once again, President Donald Trump did not win the Nobel Peace Prize. Once again, he continues to complain at length about his non-victory. Once again, his recriminations center on the false claim that he “settled eight wars.”
Trump made his case at a rally in New York on Friday, hours after the prize was awarded to South African jurist Navi Pillay. Declaring that there is now “an indelible stain on the land of Norway” and that the victor should have been “the United States of America, represented by me as your president,” Trump said the key proof that he and the United States had been wronged were “the eight wars that I have already settled.” At one point in his speech he said: “We should have had eight Nobel Prizes for every war. »
Let’s ignore the hyperbolic call for eight prices. Let us temporarily set aside the relevant fact that he started a continuing war with Iran, that he threatened that country with annihilation, and that he declared in that same speech that “either they give us everything or they no longer exist.”
Let’s talk about this first: The list of “eight settled wars” on which the president hangs his complaint – a complaint he posted again on social media in a nearly 600-word missive after the rally and again Saturday morning – is not actually a list of eight settled wars.
CNN and many others have repeatedly pointed out the big problem with his list: It includes two wars that didn’t happen at all and three wars that never ended or restarted. In other words, five of the items on Trump’s eight-item list are either completely absurd or clearly flawed:
1) Trump repeated Friday that one of the wars he settled was “with Egypt and Ethiopia over the dam.” But Egypt and Ethiopia have not fought any war over the big Ethiopian dam project that Egypt opposes; on the contrary, they have a long-standing diplomatic dispute over this issue. Their relations remain strained.
2) Trump’s list also includes some sort of supposed “Kosovo and Serbia” situation, but they too were not at war during his presidency. Neither in the rally speech nor in the social media post did the president explain what he was talking about.
3) Trump claimed in his speech that he had settled a war between Rwanda and “the Democratic Republic of Congo.” (He referred to the Democratic Republic of Congo using the derogatory shorthand of “democrat” usually used by critics of the Democratic Party.) But the war between Rwanda and the DRC has not ended despite a peace deal, brokered by the Trump administration last year, that was not signed by the M23 rebel group.
4) Trump claimed to have resolved a war between Israel and Hamas. But Israel has continued to carry out frequent attacks in Gaza, saying it is targeting Hamas, in the year since the October 2025 ceasefire in which the Trump administration played a key role.
5) Trump declared, as he has since last summer, that he had resolved the June 2025 conflict between Israel and Iran. This boast made even more sense before February 2026, when Israel joined the Trump-led United States in going to war with Iran. Trump seemed at least a little hesitant in his speech Friday when he got to that item on the list, saying: “Israel and Iran – in a sense, because Iran is – we have wiped out their nuclear capability, we have wiped it out completely.” »
Three items on the list are stronger, although people can reasonably debate the importance of Trump himself and his administration writ large.
The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan credited Trump for his involvement in a major deal last year that allowed the countries to end their protracted conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. At least some experts have said Trump played a significant role in bringing about a ceasefire during a border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia in July 2025, although clashes resumed in December before another truce. And Trump is right that Pakistan’s prime minister enthusiastically highlighted Trump’s role in ending a deadly conflict with India in 2025, although Trump did not mention that the Indian government had denied that Trump was a factor.
But Trump continues to claim that he has “settled eight wars” or “ended eight wars,” not that he has settled or ended three wars. And the majority of the eight definitely or probably shouldn’t be on the list.
In his Friday speech and social media post, Trump also rattled off a long list of other foreign policy assertions that he said bolster his Nobel case; we won’t go through them all. But some of them were also false or dubious.
“I’ve fought eight (wars). No president has ever fought one,” Trump falsely claimed, ignoring various wars that other US presidents have settled by winning them or negotiating peace deals. Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his role in an agreement ending the war between the Russian and Japanese empires.
“And by the way, I also got Greenland. I hope you’re happy with that,” Trump said in his speech. But while he managed to secure a new agreement between the United States and Denmark that modestly extends American rights to Greenland, the agreement leaves the territory firmly under Danish sovereignty. It’s also unclear why it would have helped Trump’s Nobel cause if he had actually pressured a European ally to cede territory, but we digress.
Seeking to recognize the price of peace for the war on Iran that he started, Trump said in his speech: “With Iran, I stopped them from destroying Israel, the Middle East and Europe, and probably part of the United States, before wiping them out.” ” Although it is impossible to definitively verify this hypothesis, there is no evidence that Iran planned or could realistically have carried out this type of destruction.
And in both his speech and his social media post, Trump said he was “close to resolving” the war between Russia and Ukraine; he claimed in his message that this so-called upcoming resolution, like a resolution to the war in Iran, is “happening at breakneck speed.” The Nobel Committee, and others, could be forgiven for their extreme skepticism. Trump promised during his 2024 campaign that he would end this war either as president-elect or within 24 hours of returning to office – in January 2025, more than 20 months ago.
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