President Donald Trump reacts as he receives the FIFA Peace Prize throughout the FIFA World Cup 2026 Official Draw at John F. Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts on Dec. 5, 2025 in Washington, D.C.
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Patrick Smith/Getty Pictures North America
President Trump has made it well-known that he’s coveting the Nobel Peace prize, and infrequently passes up the chance to say he has solved eight conflicts all over the world in eight months.
However regardless of the efforts, the outcomes have been blended: some outcomes are precarious, and the president’s position in brokering a deal is disputed. Others have merely unraveled
There are those you do not hear about a lot resembling Armenia and Azerbaijan. Serbia and Kosovo signed a peace settlement in 2020 throughout Trump’s first time period in workplace with the assistance of NATO and the European Union. That deal has caught.
Trump claimed credit score for securing peace between Egypt and Ethiopia. The 2 international locations weren’t at warfare, simply locked in a tense dispute over a hydroelectric dam on the Nile River.
Nonetheless, the offers at all times obtain a substantial amount of fanfare, says Max Boot, a senior fellow on the Council on International Relations and writer of Reagan: His Life and Legend.
“President Trump trumpets every one of these deals as being essentially peace in our time,” he says. “But they were all overhyped and oversold.”
Boot says what Trump and his group are actually negotiating are ceasefires, not peace agreements. “And that’s the crucial difference,” he says. “With the ceasefire, it can flare up into fighting at any moment.”
Take for instance, the peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia, which was hailed because the Kuala Lumpur Peace Accord in late October. Preventing over a long-running border dispute flared up once more between the 2 sides a couple of month later, and as soon as once more over the previous week.
Then there’s Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. A deal was reached throughout the summer time however not formally signed till earlier this month. There was nice fanfare throughout the ceremony in Washington for what Trump had referred to as a “glorious triumph”. But, the combating raged between the DRC and Rwanda whilst each side sat all the way down to signal a take care of Trump.
Ivo Daalder, former U.S. ambassador to NATO and presently a senior fellow on the Belfer Middle and Harvard’s Kennedy Faculty, says lengthy, festering issues between international locations do not get solved by signing a bit of paper in Washington.
“That takes painstaking diplomacy, hard work and a lot of a lot of time, he says. “And except yow will discover a technique to resolve the underlying battle, international locations are prepared to make use of pressure to get their method.”
But Trump often pushes back against tradition and does things his own way. Matthew Kroenig, senior director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, says that’s given Trump some success.
“His distinctive model generally produces surprising outcomes, primarily declaring victory earlier than it is achieved,” Kroening says, adding that forces others to scramble and fill in the details. “As within the case with Gaza.”
Trump took credit for ending what he said was an Arab-Israeli conflict that had been going on for 3,000 years. Daalder says Trump was able to help secure the release of all the Israeli hostages held in Gaza over the past two years. But there is still low-level fighting, and no long-term resolution in sight.
“We have not been in a position to transfer past the ceasefire and the alternate of hostages to constructing a long-lasting, peaceable state of affairs in Gaza,” Daalder says, let alone a lasting, peaceful situation between Israelis and Palestinians. “Which is, in fact, the elemental motive now we have this battle within the first place.”
Trump also helped broker a peace deal between Israel and Iran. That came after Trump inserted the U.S. into the conflict by bombing several of Iran’s nuclear sites.
Trump’s efforts to solve decades long tensions between India and Pakistan dealt a blow to U.S.-India relations. Prime Minister Narendra Modi disputed Trump’s claims that he was instrumental in brokering a deal. Shortly after, Trump imposed 50% tariffs on most U.S. imports from India. Boot calls it a major bump in relations between the two countries.
“I think although the ostensible reason for these massive tariffs is that India has been buying Russian oil, I think the real impetus was that Trump was mad at Modi for not going along with his claims of India into the India-Pakistan conflict,” Boot says.
Nonetheless, the Atlantic Council’s Kroenig says Trump can take credit score for normalizing relations between Israel and several other Arab nations throughout his first time period in workplace, together with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco.
“(It’s) pretty remarkable, getting these countries to recognize Israel and open up trade and travel,” says Kroenig.
There are nonetheless some conflicts seemingly past Trump’s grasp — most notably Ukraine and Russia.
There are additionally complicated indicators from a president making an attempt to seize a Nobel Peace Prize, says Daalder. “The direct confrontation he’s seeking with Venezuela, the possibility of an actual war with Venezuela would go directly contrary to this idea that he’s a peacemaker,” he says.
This 12 months’s Nobel Peace Prize went to María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition chief. Trump can take consolation in realizing he has obtained no less than one award for his peace efforts: he was handed the inaugural FIFA peace prize from soccer’s governing physique earlier this month. The distinction included an enormous gold medal.
