Washington DC: US President Donald Trump has once again claimed that trade and tariffs played a decisive role in preventing conflicts, including the May escalation between India and Pakistan. Speaking to Senate Republicans at the White House’s newly renovated Rose Garden, he described how he leveraged trade deals to avert what he called a “potential nuclear disaster” in South Asia.
“I mentioned eight wars, nine coming. Of the eight, five were based solely on trade and tariffs. India-Pakistan were going at it. Two nuclear powers and serious nuclear. Seven planes were shot down. They were ready to go, and I called them up. I said, ‘You go to war and we are not doing a trade deal,’” Trump said.
He claimed that both countries questioned the role of trade in the standoff. “It has a lot. You are nuclear powers, and if you do it, we are not doing a trade deal. 24 hours later, they called me. ‘We have decided not to do it.’ We stopped the war. We stopped a potential disaster, a nuclear disaster, because of trade,” he asserted.
His remarks refer to the May escalation following India’s Operation Sindoor, in which precision strikes targeted nine terrorist camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) after the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack that killed 26 civilians.
Trump strongly defended tariffs as a strategic tool, not merely an economic measure. “Tariffs equal national security. Remember that. Tariffs equal national security,” he repeated.
He added that tariffs also “equal wealth for our nation because we have taken in hundreds of billions of dollars in a friendly manner, given to us by nations that used to take it from us and they use tariffs on us; we never use tariffs on them because we were foolish”.
He went on to claim that tariffs have “made us a wealthy country. They have given us tremendous defence; they have given us things we can do for other countries… Really, it is national security; it is national defence”.
Trump has consistently maintained that his trade and tariff policies allowed the United States to de-escalate tensions between India and Pakistan. India, however, has repeatedly rejected such claims, emphasising that all issues with Pakistan, including those related to Jammu and Kashmir, are strictly bilateral matters.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: ZEE News
