If Trump has his sights on a Nobel peace prize, he should focus on Gaza

Earlier this summer in the Oval Office, Donald Trump boasted: “We just ended a war that was going on for 30 years.” Not for the first time the US president was confused about the past and catastrophically wrong about the future.

- Steve Bloomfield International Editor

Roughly two weeks after Trump's announcement of a “peace deal” between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda, fighters from the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group “summarily executed” more than 140 people in eastern DRC, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW). It was, said HRW, one of M23's “worst atrocities”.

Before his recent red carpet summit with Russian president and international criminal court indictee Vladimir Putin, Trump claimed he has “solved six wars in six months”. It's not true by any stretch of the imagination, but the exaggeration wrapped in a brazen and desperate attempt to win the Nobel peace prize - tells us something, not just about the psyche of the president, but of the role of the US under Trump's second coming.

First, though, those wars - starting with two where no one was actually fighting.

Trump has claimed that: “Serbia, Kosovo was going to go at it, going to be a big war.” In his telling, he warned both countries that there would be no trade with the US. “They said, well, maybe we won't go at it.” This all came as something of a surprise to people in the region, who weren't aware they were on the brink of a “big war”.