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United States President Donald Trump has once again asserted that he prevented a potential “nuclear war” between India and Pakistan earlier this year. Speaking in an interview with CBS News on Sunday, Trump said his use of trade and tariff threats helped defuse the escalating military confrontation between the two South Asian neighbours. Trump says tariffs helped stop India-Pakistan conflict Trump claimed that in May, India and Pakistan were on the brink of a major military conflict, which he managed to stop using economic pressure. “Out of all the wars that I have stopped, I used tariffs to stop 60 per cent of them,” Trump said. “But it did work with India, and it did work with Pakistan… If it wasn’t for tariffs and trade, I wouldn’t have been able to make the deals.” The US President stated that both nations were “going to have a nuclear war”, but his intervention, in the form of a trade warning, convinced them to stand down. “I told both of them, ‘If you guys don’t work out a deal fast, you’re not gonna do any business with the United States.’ They were both great leaders, and they worked out a deal, and they stopped the war. That would’ve been a bad war. It would’ve been a nuclear war,” Trump said. India never confirmed Trump’s claims India has consistently rejected suggestions that US intervention influenced the ceasefire agreement reached with Pakistan. The brief four-day confrontation, which Trump referred to, followed India’s Operation Sindoor, a retaliatory strike against terror bases in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir after the April 22 terror attack in Kashmir’s Pahalgam that killed 26 people. While Pakistan later called for restraint, New Delhi maintained that its military actions were “limited and precise” and denied any third-party involvement in the de-escalation process. Trump, however, attempted to validate his claim by recalling an incident during the Gaza peace summit where, he said, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif publicly thanked him. “The Prime Minister of Pakistan stood up the other day and he said, ‘If Donald Trump didn’t get involved, many millions of people would be dead right now,’” he told CBS. Trump defends tariff diplomacy When asked by CBS why his trade-based diplomacy has not worked with Russian President Vladimir Putin amid the ongoing Ukraine conflict, Trump argued that the situation is “different”. “He’s not somebody that buys a lot from us because of foolishness. I think he’d like to be. He wants to trade with us and make money for Russia and that’s great,” he said. Trump also expressed confidence that he could stop the Ukraine war as well, insisting that his combination of economic leverage and personal diplomacy remains effective.
