Ivo Daalder, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, is a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center and host of the weekly podcast “World Review with Ivo Daalder.” He writes POLITICO’s From Across the Pond column.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s quixotic quest to receive the Nobel Peace Prize has guided his foreign policy ever since returning to power. Unfortunately, his desire to be the world’s “peacemaker-in-chief” is based on a profound fallacy: that peace merely entails an end to fighting.
As any student of Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz knows, war and peace are not opposites — they’re the two ends of a continuum that defines relations between states. “War,” the general once famously remarked, is “the continuation of politics by other means.”
It’s doubtful Trump has read Clausewitz, or that he even cares much about the actual details of war and peace. His goal is different: to be recognized as the person who ends wars.
“I’ve stopped six wars,” he said last month. “I’m averaging about one a month” — a claim that, if true, would indeed be deserving of a Nobel. So, let’s take a closer look at his record as peacemaker thus far.
The list of wars Trump professes to have ended starts with the clash between India and Pakistan last May. “They have been fighting for about a thousand years,” the U.S. president claimed, “but “I got things settled.” He also added that he may well have prevented a nuclear war.
India, however, vociferously denies any U.S. involvement in bringing the fighting to a close. And even if Delhi needs to maintain that line for domestic purposes, the fact remains that a ceasefire is hardly the same as a lasting settlement to a conflict dating back to India’s independence and partition in 1947.
Actual peace would mean settling the competing claims over Kashmir, which have resulted in violent clashes and wars between the two nations for decades — though, of course, way short of a millennium. And while the active fighting may have ended for now, the underlying conflict very much continues to mark relations between the two countries.
Next on Trump’s list of peace deals is the clash between Israel and Iran. “Look,” he told a gathering of NATO leaders in June, “we just ended a war in 12 days that was simmering for 30 years.”
That’s partly true — Trump’s decision to target core parts of Iran’s nuclear program did clearly play an important role in ending Israel’s bombing strikes and Iran’s counterstrikes. But that’s a far cry from achieving lasting peace. Instead, Iran will now likely intensify its effort to build a nuclear weapon, and Israel has made clear it reserves the right to strike at any time if Iran were to rebuild its nuclear or missile program and air defenses.
Not long after, in late June, came a comparatively more substantial deal to end the fighting between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Brokered by the U.S. and signed in the Oval Office, the agreement requires Rwanda to withdraw its troops from the DRC within 90 days.
“We just ended a war that was going on for 30 years with 6 million people dead,” Trump declared — though that number included the millions killed in civil wars within both nations. “No other president could do it.”
But while this deal is, indeed, a real step toward ending the conflict, it’s important to remember that the key lies in its implementation. And on that front, news is much more mixed, as fighting between the Rwandan-backed M23 rebel group and the DRC continues unabated — in part because M23 didn’t sign on to the deal.
The following month then saw Trump have a hand in securing a ceasefire between Cambodia and Thailand, after violent border clashes had erupted in late July. Facing pressure from China, Malaysia and the promise of trade deals with the U.S., the two countries eventually agreed to stop shooting and halt dispatching more troops to the region.
Yet again, the underlying conflict that resulted in these armed clashes remains unresolved. Cambodia and Thailand have been fighting over the demarcation of their border, including for the crucial location of centuries-old Hindu temples along their 800-kilometer frontier, for decades now. And though Trump’s trade threats may have helped halt the shooting, that hardly justifies his subsequent claim “to be the president of PEACE!”
Finally, earlier this month, the U.S. president presided over the conclusion of a major agreement ending the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Following major clashes over Nagorno-Karabakh — an enclave in Azerbaijan that Armenia had seized in 1992 and Baku regained in 2023 — much of the leg work on this agreement had been completed before Trump took office. But two sticking points remained: A demand from Azerbaijan that Armenia erase any claim to Nagorno-Karabakh from its constitution — which will require a referendum — and a transportation link between two parts of Azerbaijan that runs through Armenian territory.
Under Trump, the U.S.-brokered talks did lead to an agreement, including a U.S.-leased roadway connecting the two areas of Azerbaijan — a substantial deal and a real accomplishment. But, again, implementation will be key.
Nonetheless, Trump’s boast of ending six wars in six months is a lot less than meets the eye. The fact is, even if he had been completely successful in ending these wars, his record would still be overshadowed by his failure to end the two wars he actually vowed to solve— the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Far from ending them in 24 hours, as he boasted he would do during his reelection campaign, the situation in both has worsened since Trump’s return: In Gaza, the U.S. leader has essentially given the Israeli government a green light to occupy the strip, washing his hands of any effort to secure an end to the fighting. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, he sought to move the peace process forward by meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska — only to come up empty-handed and seemingly more in sync with Moscow than Kyiv.
Achieving peace — the resolution of conflict, not just an end to fighting — is hard. It takes more than a phone call or a meeting, no matter how charismatic and persuasive the peacemaker thinks they might be. It requires detailed knowledge, intensive negotiations, a search for compromise and carrots as well as sticks to get results. And even then, most efforts fail — not because the peacemaker is incompetent but simply because continuing to fight is often easier than finding a resolution both sides will accept.
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