Trump claims he ended a war - between countries that are 4,000 miles apart
Trump has made clear he wants a Nobel Peace Prize, and has been frequently citing his diplomatic successes
If you haven't heard of the Armenian-Cambodian conflict, that's okay, because neither has anyone else — other than President Donald Trump, who claims to have ended the supposedly brewing clash.
During the American Cornerstone Institute's Founders' Dinner at the Mount Vernon estate in Virginia Saturday, Trump again rattled off his peacemaking resume, the latest push in his desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
One of the wars he mentioned ending was a conflict between "Cambodia and Armenia."
The president did not elaborate on what allegedly set leaders in capitals Phnom Penh and Yerevan — which are 4,150 miles apart — against each other, but he assured the crowd that war "was just starting, and it was a bad one."
There has been no conflict between Armenia and Cambodia. The 79-year-old president appears to have mixed up Armenia's tensions with Azerbaijan, and border violence between Cambodia and Thailand.
To Trump's credit, his administration did help smooth over the latter conflict. In July, clashes at the Cambodia–Thailand border left 43 people dead and more than 300,000 displaced over a five-day period.
Trump and Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim began making calls and mediated on the conflict. The nations agreed to a ceasefire on July 28.
In August, Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Manet joined with Pakistan and Israel to nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize. He credited the U.S. president with using "visionary and innovative diplomacy" to help defuse the border crisis.
It's possible that Armenia was simply on the president's mind when he made the slip-up during the dinner speech. Just before his gaffe, he had been discussing the very real conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan that is populated by ethnic Armenians.
In August, the leaders of both nations met in the Oval Office and signed an agreement to end the conflict over the region.
Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan shook hands during the meeting. Trump called the event "historic" at the time.
His Saturday night dinner stumble isn't the first time Trump has mixed up which countries he's allegedly helped out of conflict.
During a joint press conference with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer last week, Trump again bungled his brag, claiming that the U.S. "settled" a conflict between Azerbaijan — which he struggled to pronounce — and Albania.
The same week on Fox News, he made the mistake again, and repeated it a third time while discussing his diplomatic victories on a conservative radio show.
Trump — who recently oversaw the renaming of the Defense Department to the Department of War — has made clear he wants a Nobel Peace Prize, and has been frequently citing his diplomatic successes.
In June, after he bombed nuclear facilities in Iran, Trump complained on Truth Social that “I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for this,” before giving a list of negotiations brokered by his administration.
In February, during an Oval Office meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump complained that “they will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize.”
“It’s too bad. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me,” Trump said.
In October, while he was on the campaign trail, he complained that former President Barack Obama received a Nobel Peace Prize during the first year of his presidency.
“If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds,” he told the Detroit Economic Club at the time.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments