Wednesday, during an interview with Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” President Donald Trump credited his tariff policy for playing a role in his Middle East peace deal.
Trump told host Sean Hannity that the economic pressure coerced actors in the world to stop fighting.
“Mr. President, you are expending a lot of effort, worldwide, to bring about peace,” host Sean Hannity said. “How did this becomes one of your top agenda items considering this has gone on for decades and decades? A lot of the Arab nations that have formed coalitions with you were reluctant and resistant for decades to ever be a part of the solution. That was a big part of what happened here today. Explain — can you explain that part of it?”
Trump replied, “Well, I develop relationships with people and sometimes those relationships lead to great things, and in the case of many of the Arab nations, the wealthiest nations in the world, if you look, although with what we’ve done in the United States, I think we top everybody by a lot with the tariffs and all of that. But, you know, having the ability to deal with trade, having the ability to use tariffs to help me make a point — the tariffs have brought peace to the world. I’m telling you, they brought peace to the world. And not only here, but with so many other deals. You know, I’ve made seven peace deals where countries were in many cases, 30, 31 years, 135, 137 years they’ve been fighting and millions of people being killed. And I brought peace. And I did it through — in not all cases, but probably in at least five of the seven that we’ve done so far, it was through trade. That we’re not going to deal with people that fight. We’re not going to deal, and we’re going to put tariffs on you. We’re not going to let you deal in the United States. We’ll put tariffs on you.”
“And without that, without the tariffs — I mean, far more than even the money that we’re taking in, which is trillions of dollars, essentially trillions of dollars,” he continued. “Far much — more importantly, it gives you a tremendous road to peace and the saving of millions of lives, just millions and millions of lives. You look at India and Pakistan. I said, ‘Well, we’re not going to do business with either of you if you don’t — if you don’t put it together.’ These are two nuclear nations that were — seven planes were shot down as you know, and they were really at it. They were going at it, and I said, ‘We’re not going to do any business with you. We’re not going to have anything to do with you. We’re going to put massive tariffs on you, both — in both cases.’ And they said, ‘Well, we got to start talking about this. This is tremendous amounts of money and power we’re dealing with.’”
Trump added, “And within 24 hours, I had a peace deal. They made — they stopped. They stopped the fighting. And we can go one after another. You’ve been really nice enough to announce all of the deals, but there have been many deals. And a lot of them — a lot of the settlements were based on trade.”
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