Again, President Donald Trump did not win the Nobel Peace Prize. Again, he keeps complaining about his non-victory at length. Again, his griping is centered on the false claim that he “settled eight wars.”
Trump made his case at a New York rally on Friday, hours after the prize was awarded to South African jurist Navi Pillay. Declaring that there is now “an indelible stain on the country of Norway” and that the victor should have been “the United States of America, represented by me as your president,” Trump said the key evidence he and the US were wronged is “the eight wars that I’ve already settled.” At one point in the address, he claimed, “We should have had eight Nobel Prizes, for each war.”
Let’s ignore the hyperbolic call for eight prizes. Let’s temporarily leave aside the pertinent fact that he started an ongoing war with Iran, has threatened that country with annihilation, and declared in this very speech that “either they give us everything or they don’t exist any longer.”
Let’s talk first about this: the “settled eight wars” list on which the president is hanging his complaint – a complaint he posted again on social media in a nearly 600-word missive after the rally and again on Saturday morning – is not actually a list of eight settled wars.
CNN and many others have repeatedly noted the big problem with his list: it includes two wars that didn’t happen at all and three wars that either never ended or have resumed. In other words, five of the items on Trump’s eight-item list are either total nonsense or clearly flawed:
1) Trump said again Friday that one of the wars he settled was “Egypt and Ethiopia over the dam.” But Egypt and Ethiopia didn’t fight any war over the major Ethiopian dam project that is opposed by Egypt; rather, they have had a long-running diplomatic dispute on the issue. Their relations remain tense.
2) Trump’s list also includes some sort of supposed situation between “Kosovo and Serbia,” but they too were not at war during his presidency. In neither the rally speech nor the social media post did the president explain what he was talking about.
3) Trump claimed in the speech that he settled a war between Rwanda and “the Democrat Republic of the Congo.” (He referred to the Democratic Republic of Congo using the pejorative shortening of “Democratic” usually deployed by critics of the Democratic Party.) But the war involving Rwanda and the DRC has not ended despite a peace agreement, brokered by the Trump administration last year, that was not signed by the M23 rebel group.
4) Trump claimed he settled a war between Israel and Hamas. But Israel has continued to conduct frequent attacks in Gaza, saying it is targeting Hamas, in the year since the October 2025 ceasefire in which the Trump administration was a key player.
5) Trump said, as he has since last summer, that he settled the June 2025 conflict between Israel and Iran. That boast made more sense before February 2026, when Israel joined the Trump-led US in going to war with Iran. Trump seemed at least a little tentative in the Friday speech when he got to this item on the list, saying, “Israel and Iran – in a sense, because Iran is – we’ve wiped out their nuclear capacity, totally wiped it out.”
Three items on the list are more solid, though people can reasonably debate the importance of Trump himself and his broader administration.
Leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan have credited Trump for his involvement in a significant deal last year that moved the countries toward ending their prolonged Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. At least some experts said Trump played a significant part in achieving a ceasefire in a July 2025 border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, though the clashes flared up again in December before another truce. And Trump is right that Pakistan’s prime minister has enthusiastically highlighted Trump’s role in ending a deadly 2025 conflict with India, though Trump didn’t mention that India’s government has denied Trump was a factor.
But Trump keeps claiming he “settled eight wars” or “ended eight wars,” not that he settled or ended three wars. And the majority of the eight either definitely or probably shouldn’t be on the list.
In the Friday speech and social media post, Trump also rattled off a laundry list of other foreign policy assertions he claimed bolster his Nobel case; we won’t go through them all. But some of them were false or dubious, too.
“I did eight (wars). No president’s ever done any,” Trump falsely claimed, ignoring various wars other US presidents have settled by winning them or by brokering peace agreements. For one, Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel in 1906 for his role in an agreement ending a war between the Russian and Japanese empires.
“And I also, by the way, got Greenland. I hope you’re happy about that,” Trump said in the speech. But while he did secure a new US agreement with Denmark that modestly expands US rights in Greenland, the deal leaves the territory firmly under Danish sovereignty. It’s also not clear why it would have helped Trump’s Nobel case if he had actually pressured a European ally into giving up territory, but we digress.
Seeking peace prize credit for the Iran war he started, Trump said in the speech, “With Iran, I stopped them from destroying Israel, the Middle East, and Europe, and probably a piece of the United States before we obliterated them.” While it’s impossible to definitively fact-check this hypothetical, there is no proof Iran had planned or could have realistically achieved this kind of destruction.
And in both the speech and the social media post, Trump declared that he is “about to settle” the war between Russia and Ukraine; he claimed in the post that this supposed coming resolution, like a resolution to the Iran war, is “happening at breakneck speed.” The Nobel Committee, and others, could be forgiven for 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.