Just days after he told journalists he had stopped a war between Azerbaijan and Albania, US President Donald Trump again inserted a different country into the long-running Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, claiming to have prevented a war between Armenia and Cambodia. 

Speaking at the American Cornerstone Institute Founder's Dinner, Trump credited himself with “stopping the war” between Cambodia and Armenia and warned the conflict “was only beginning and could have had serious consequences”.

Armenia has fought several rounds of hostilities with neighbouring Azerbaijan over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, most recently in 2020. Cambodia, by contrast, has no involvement in that conflict, although it did recently come close to war with its own neighbour Thailand. 

Despite confusing the name of one of the combatants, Trump recalled the historic summit between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in the White House on August 8. 

“They came to my office, the two leaders two great guys. One was there [in office] 22 years, one was there seven and they both said the entire term of their office, all they did was kill people on the other side. and now, they're sitting in my office. They're at the Oval Office,” Trump told the event at Mount Vernon, Virginia, which was broadcast by Fox News. 

“It's pretty wide and they had one over here, one over there. And slowly over the course of about an hour, they came close, and at the end of an hour we were hugging each other and holding hands,” he continued. 

“It was an amazing thing. and we settled that war that was not settleable as the expression goes. Cambodia and Armenia.” 

Trump went on to reference other international hotspots, citing India and Pakistan, Kosovo and Serbia, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and — naming the correct country this time — Cambodia and Thailand. 

In his speech, the US president made it clear he was hoping for a Nobel Peace Prize, telling the audience: “I was told that if you can stop Russia and Ukraine, you should get the Nobel Prize. I said, well, what about the seven others? I should get a Nobel Prize for each." 

Previously, at a press conference in the UK on September 18, Trump mistakenly referred to Armenia as Albania while claiming to have resolved a conflict with Azerbaijan that never involved the Balkan country. The US president also struggled with the pronunciation of Azerbaijan, giving a lengthy pause before coming out with “Aber … baijan”. This was at least the third time he had made a similar error concerning the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.