“Egypt and Ethiopia, that's another beauty. Ethiopia built a big-- dam where there's no water going to the Nile.”

60 Minutes interview claiming credit for ending multiple international disputes

Trump himself disproved this claim in writing. In January 2026, two months after listing the dispute among the conflicts he had resolved, he sent a letter to Egypt's president saying he was 'ready to restart U.S. mediation between Egypt and Ethiopia.' You do not restart mediation of a dispute that has been resolved.

The decades-long quarrel over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam remains unresolved. Ethiopia completed and inaugurated the dam in September 2025 over Egypt's objections, and years of on-off negotiations, including African Union-mediated talks, have never produced a binding agreement on Nile water sharing. Analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Washington Institute described the standoff as active and escalating into 2026. The claim also inflates what was ever at stake: Egypt and Ethiopia were never at war, so there was no war to end. This is one of the conflicts Trump counts in his shifting 'wars I stopped' tally, which fact-checkers have repeatedly found to include disputes that were neither wars nor resolved.

Donald Trump, letter to Egypt's president, January 2026, as reported by NBC News: "ready to restart U.S. mediation between Egypt and Ethiopia to responsibly resolve the question of 'The Nile Water Sharing' once and for all."