'Used Trade to Stop India-Pakistan War': Trump Repeats Claim Again

New Delhi: US President Donald Trump has again repeated the claim that he stopped a war between India and Pakistan dangling the possibility of cancelling trade.

This appears to be the 17th or 18th time across all public platforms that Trump has made the claim that the US facilitated the ceasefire between the South Asian neighbours in May by leveraging trade negotiations.

As The Wire has reported before, the US administration had also formalised the claim in a legal document, with US Commerce Secretary Howard W. Lutnick stating in a written filing to a New York federal court that Trump used trade access as an incentive to “avert a full-scale war” between India and Pakistan.

India has said that the ceasefire came after a talk between the Directors General of Military Operations. In a 35-minute call, prime minister Narendra Modi told Trump – according to the Indian government – that India had never, “at any level”, discussed a trade deal or third-party mediation with the United States during its military standoff with Pakistan.

On June 27, according to PTI, Trump told reporters at the White House, "We did some great work. India and Pakistan. That was going to be maybe nuclear. We did that. We did a lot of work. I don't know if there's ever been a president that's done much more."

He then said that he has applied a similar tactic in the conflict between Serbia and Kosovo.

“Serbia, Kosovo is going to go at it, going to be a big war. I said, ‘You go at it, there's no trade with the United States'...That's what happened with India and Pakistan. I was negotiating with both of them and I said to [treasury secretary] Scott [Bessent], I said to Howard [Lutnick], cancel all deals with India and Pakistan. They're not trading with us because they're in a war,” Trump said.

Trump also said that India and Pakistan countries “called back [saying], 'What do we do?’. I said, ‘Look, you want to have trade with the United States. It's great, but you want to go and start using nuclear weapons on each other. We're not going to allow that.' And they both agreed, both have great leaders. They both agreed not to do it. So so we did a lot."

Trump also said that he thinks that with "some of the bigger countries, [like] India," the US is likely to reach a deal where it has "the right to go in and trade."

"Right now it's restricted. You can't walk in there. You can't even think about it. We're looking to get a full trade barrier dropping, which is unthinkable and I'm not sure that that's going to happen, but as of this moment, we've agreed to go into India and trade," he said.

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