- calendar_today August 8, 2025
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President Donald Trump is touting his foreign policy legacy again, this time claiming to have ended six wars in his second term in office. The pronouncement was made Monday at the White House during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other European leaders, during which Trump also claimed he is close to ending the ongoing war in Ukraine as well. “I’ve done six wars — I’ve ended six wars,” Trump said in a news conference at the White House on Monday, “Look, India-Pakistan, we’re talking about big places. You just take a look at some of these wars. You go to Africa and take a look at them.”
The White House recently released a statement calling Trump the “President of Peace” by pointing to accords or initiatives with Armenia and Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Thailand, Israel and Iran, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt and Ethiopia and Serbia and Kosovo. The statement also referenced the Abraham Accords brokered in Trump’s first term in office and which normalized ties between Israel and several Arab states.
Fragile Agreements and Overstated Wins Trump has touted the various accords as evidence of his leadership skills and diplomatic acumen but analysts say they are fragile ceasefires rather than permanent peace agreements. In the case of Israel and Iran for instance, Trump claimed to have brokered peace following a 12-day war in the region but neither side has backed down with tensions high over Tehran’s nuclear program and decades of enmity showing little sign of ending. Other initiatives have failed to get off the ground.
A Trump effort to broker peace between Israel and the Hamas movement failed while first-term outreach to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un ended with Pyongyang having more nuclear weapons than when it started. One of his latest accomplishments was the declaration between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the two which was signed at the White House earlier this month. The declaration commits both parties to recognize borders and renounce the use of violence.
The two countries also opened a U.S.-controlled transportation corridor that is being touted as the “Trump Route for Peace and Prosperity.” Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev called the deal a miracle while others experts believe deeper constitutional and territorial issues have been left unresolved. In Southeast Asia, Trump used trade threats to force an end to a border clash between Cambodia and Thailand that had killed 38 people.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) also played an important role in the matter but Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Manet credited Trump personally and even nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. South Asia is more murky. Trump claimed credit for easing a border flare-up between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan in May and while Islamabad praised Washington’s involvement, New Delhi rejected the claim.
The truce left the disputed Kashmir issue open, which puts the durability of the deal in doubt. Africa, Kosovo, and the Road Ahead Trump has also claimed credit for brokering agreements in Africa, notably between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo aimed at disarming militias and reducing tensions along their common border. But the M23 rebel group which is at the heart of the violence in the region rejected the accord. Observers also say the U.S. is acting partly from a desire to check China for control of Africa’s mineral wealth.
His claim regarding Egypt and Ethiopia relates to their long-running dispute over the Nile dam project. Though Trump has pushed for a compromise, there is no binding deal. He has also highlighted an earlier effort between Serbia and Kosovo, which took place in his first term and included steps toward economic normalization. But the two sides are still without full diplomatic relations and most recent talks have been EU-led.
Critics have accused Trump of dismantling parts of the State Department and cutting budgets for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which make it harder for him to turn temporary ceasefires into longer-lasting peace.
But others have also noted that his often unconventional methods, which included blunt threats and personal branding of agreements, have yielded results — if only for the short term. Celeste Wallander, a former assistant secretary of defense now with the Center for a New American Security think tank, said Trump’s quiet diplomacy in easing tensions between India and Pakistan was more effective than his headline-grabbing public announcements.
“The ones that were helpful … were conducted in a professional way, quietly, diplomatically … finding common ground between the parties,” she said. As Trump now pushes forward with what he is describing as a peace drive in Ukraine, it is not clear if his approach can yield enduring solutions or whether his record will ultimately be more remembered for bold claims than actual results.





