Trump declared the Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict “solved” last October and called it his “eighth war” ended, mostly “within a day.”
Trump had nothing to do with it.
The momentary ceasefire was actually brokered by Turkey and Qatar. Pakistan’s leadership understood the Trump play immediately: soak him as a “genuine man of peace,” cynically nominate him for a Nobel peace prize, and watch the tariff rate drop from 50% to 19% while India gets punished.
Geopolitical analyst Christine Fair put it plainly:
I don’t think Trump is a sophisticated creature. I think with Trump, flattery goes a really, really long way.
She may as well have been talking about Mussolini.
The corrupt transaction was naked; Pakistan bought favorable treatment with words that cost nothing, and Trump put on pants that didn’t exist to walk around taking credit for a peace he didn’t make.
Today?
Boom. Pakistani jets are bombing Kabul, Kandahar, and Paktia. Pakistan’s defence minister says “patience has run out” and Trump’s big peace deal is “open war.” The ceasefire didn’t hold because it was never built to hold. It was built to generate a headline for corrupt coin transfers.
The same pattern plays out everywhere Trump puts on his victory pants.
In June 2025, Operation Midnight Hammer dropped bunker-busters on three Iranian nuclear facilities. Trump announced he had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Eight months later, his own envoy Steve Witkoff told Fox News that Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.” The Pentagon’s own assessment said the strikes set Iran back one to two years — and an early intelligence assessment leaked to CNN said it was closer to months. The IAEA says nearly a thousand pounds of highly enriched uranium remains unaccounted for at the bombed sites. So what did “obliteration” actually produce? The largest American military buildup in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq: two carrier strike groups, more than 150 aircraft repositioned, F-22s deployed to Israel for the first time, over 10,000 additional service members flooding the region. Trump killed a nuclear deal that capped enrichment at 3.67%, bombed facilities that were under international inspection, declared the problem solved, and created a crisis that now requires a permanent war footing to manage.
Each “win” is an ever-bigger setback. The man is a bankruptcy magnet, as a financial and moral loser.
This is what happens when foreign policy serves one man’s vanity instead of the people caught in the bombing runs. His push for a pause becomes a permission structure for wealth extraction and radical power shift, deepening the conflict and increasing pain.
Every conflict gets a Trump message that nobody with power is actually watching, they just want a piece of credit, so they rearm and wait. Gaza ceasefire violations are still being tracked. The India-Pakistan “peace” was a bilateral military understanding that India says had nothing to do with Washington. Iran’s nuclear program was “obliterated” into a standoff that looks more like 2003 every day. Pakistan-Afghanistan was “solved” into open war.
Trump claims victories the way Enron claimed stock gains. Authoritarians love medals, lots and lots of shiny medals, not to describe reality but to replace it with garbage. The con only works if you never go back and check.
Afghan women hit by mortar shells at refugee camps and Iranian civilians bracing for another decade or two of American bombs are the cost of a bankrupt foreign policy run on attention-seeking social media vibes. Counting the days of dead and wounded was never part of any Trump “peace” deal.
Related: The man who wisely bet against Elon Musk and said that Trump’s DOGE was a total fraud, has made a fortune by being right.