US President Donald Trump has once again asserted that hostilities between Pakistan and India were settled after he brokered the truce between the South Asian nuclear rivals, saying he urged the two countries to focus on trade instead of war.
"Through trade I got things settled with India, Pakistan. I think it was trade more than any other reason. That's how I got involved," Trump told reporters on Friday during a trilateral summit at the White House involving Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
The summit culminated in the signing of a peace deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia, who asserted that Trump's mediation should earn him a Nobel Peace Prize — an award the US leader has been vocal about seeking.
"I said, you know, I don't want to be dealing with countries that are trying to blow up themselves and maybe the world, you know, they're nuclear nations," Trump said, referring to his calls to Indian and Pakistani leadership in May.
Trump stated that resolving the Pakistan-India conflict "was a big one" because it could have quickly escalated into a nuclear war.
"That was a big one, getting that one settled, I think you'd agree that was a big one and they were going at it, you know, they were shooting airplanes out of the sky. You know, they five or six planes got shot down in the last little skirmish and then it was going to escalate from there and they could have gotten to be very, very bad."
The nuclear-armed neighbours halted their worst fighting in nearly three decades after agreeing to a Trump-announced ceasefire in May, following four days of tit-for-tat strikes involving hundreds of drones, missiles and fighter jets that killed at least 60 people and forced thousands to flee their homes along their border and in disputed Kashmir.
Pakistan says it downed at least five Indian jets, including three Rafales, in a battle involving some 30 Pakistani and 70 Indian fighter aircraft.
Initially, India denied any aircraft losses, but later its officials conceded that Pakistan shot down an unspecified number of its fighter jets.
Modi says Trump played no role
Trump has repeatedly mentioned his efforts, praising Pakistani and Indian leaders for agreeing to a ceasefire after his trade-leveraged intervention.
New Delhi, however, denies Trump's role in truce, while Islamabad credits the US leader and has nominated him for the Nobel prize.
Recently, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the country's Parliament that Trump played no role in Pakistan-India truce.
"No world leader asked us to stop the operation," Modi told the lawmakers after Rahul Gandhi from the opposition Congress party challenged him to say "inside the parliament that Donald Trump is lying."
"It is completely incorrect and baseless to say that the military action was stopped because of pressure," Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh told parliament last month.
Trump and his administration have claimed more than 30 times that the US brokered a ceasefire between India and Pakistan.
On Thursday, US doubled down on Trump's role with Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying that, "We got involved directly, and the president was able to deliver on that peace."
Rubio, speaking with EWTN’s The World Over dubbed Trump as the "president of peace" and referenced other diplomatic efforts during Trump's leadership, including Cambodia-Thailand, Armenia-Azerbaijan, and DRC-Rwanda conflicts.
