Trump credits 350% tariff threat with preventing Pakistan-India nuclear disaster

• Trump says he averted likely nuclear clash using economic pressure.
•  Says PM Shebaz called to thank him, saying Trump “saved millions.”
• Notes five of eight global conflicts were settled because of trade.

In a special address at the Saudi investment conference on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump once again claimed he stopped a nuclear war between Pakistan and India — a crisis he says could have killed “millions.”

Trump expressed these views with a familiar boast about being able to settle disputes, before drifting into an anecdote about how he handled what he described as an imminent armed clash in South Asia.

According to Trump, both countries were “going to go at it, nuclear weapons,” and he said he had warned them that Washington would slap a massive tariff if they moved ahead.

“I said that’s okay, you can go at it, but I’m putting a 350% tariff on each country,” he told the audience, adding that he refused to “have you guys shooting nuclear weapons at each other, killing millions of people, and having the nuclear dust floating over Los Angeles.”

He said leaders in both capitals pushed back, but he claimed he held firm: “They said, ‘We don’t like that.’ I said, ‘I don’t care if you like it or not.’”

Trump then recounted a moment when, as he put it, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called him to acknowledge the intervention.

“He actually said, ‘I saved millions,’” Trump told the room, adding that the praise was repeated “in front of Susie,” a reference to one of his longtime advisers. “He said, ‘President Trump saved millions and millions of lives.’”

The US president also said he received a call from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shortly afterwards.

“I got a call… saying, ‘We’re done,’” Trump claimed. “We’re not going to go to war.”

For Pakistan, the remarks stand out not only because of the nuclear angle but because Trump rarely speaks so directly about his dealings with Islamabad. 

The speech eventually swerved to other matters — including Sudan — with Trump saying Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had urged him to take on a dispute he “didn’t think was going to be so easy to do.”

“He said, ‘Yeah, thank you. Thank you to you,’” Trump remarked, explaining that it wasn’t even on his “charts” but that he would now “start working in Sudan.”

Still, the heart of his address kept returning to the same claim: that he used economic pressure — tariffs, mostly — to shut down conflicts. 

“Five of the eight were settled because of the economy, because of trade,” he said, insisting that no other US president would have used the same approach.