WASHINGTON − He’s begged and he’s pleaded. He’s cajoled and he’s threatened.

Yet, more than seven months into his term, President Donald Trump has been unable to end two of the world’s bloodiest ongoing conflicts.

At one end, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has ignored deadline after deadline to end his war against Ukraine and joined authoritarian leaders recently in China for a massive show of force against the West.

At the other, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose military offensive in Gaza has been accompanied by famine and has driven a growing list of countries to say they’ll back Palestinian statehood.

In the middle, a president who promised to put both conflicts to bed – and whose talk of a Nobel Peace Prize is smacking up against the reality of the Gaza and Ukraine wars.

When it comes to his peacemaking efforts, Trump says he just wants to stop the killing. He has denied craving what is perhaps the most prestigious award in the world.

“You can’t put yourself in that position,” Trump told The Daily Caller on Aug. 29. “But I can say this, nobody’s done in history what I’ve done.”

Even as Trump has stalled in Ukraine and Gaza, he has said more than once that he deserves the prize for resolving smaller conflicts during his two terms as president. The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Oct. 10 in Oslo, Norway.

“They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize,” Trump said during a Feb. 4 meeting with Netanyahu in the Oval Office. “It's too bad. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.”

Norwegian cold call?

In August, the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv reported that Norway’s finance finister, Jens Stoltenberg, had received an unplanned call from Trump to discuss tariffs – and the Nobel Prize.

Stoltenberg, a former prime minister, told Reuters the call was to discuss tariffs and economic cooperation. "I will not go into further detail about the content of the conversation," he added. (The five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards each year’s Nobel Peace Prize, is appointed by Norway’s parliament.)

The Nobel fixation has drawn ridicule from some of Trump’s opponents.

“Trump is begging foreign leaders to put him up for the Nobel Prize. Have we ever had a president so pathetic? Does that sound like someone who’s firing on all cylinders?” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a Sept. 2 post on X.

Trump the peacemaker

Trump says he deserves credit for ending seven wars. The White House says he is counting conflicts that would have broken out if he hadn’t stepped in.

It listed the halt in fighting between Israel and Iran – which ended after the U.S. bombed Iranian nuclear sites – and agreements between Thailand and Cambodia, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and Pakistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Serbia and Kosovo.

“No president in history has done more to advance the cause of peace,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters on Aug. 29 as he brought up Trump’s Nobel nominations in response to a question about the president's faith in Putin.

Foreign policy experts have said several of the White House's examples do not qualify as wars. The Serbia-Kosovo deal is an economic normalization agreement from Trump's first term.

Trump’s role in halting cross-border violence between India and Pakistan has been disputed by New Delhi. Still, Islamabad nominated him for the Nobel Prize for what it called “stellar statesmanship.” The leaders of at least four countries, including Netanyahu, have said they would put Trump up for the prize.

Rep. Claudia Tenney, a Republican from New York, has twice nominated Trump for the Nobel Prize for the 2020 Abraham Accords peace agreements between several Arab countries and Israel.

Nobel dreams and disappointment

Trump has groused that he won’t win the ultimate recognition for stopping any of the conflicts.

“No, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do, including Russia/Ukraine, and Israel/Iran, whatever those outcomes may be, but the people know, and that’s all that matters to me!” he said in a June 20 post on Truth Social.

Amid the Peace Prize talk, he’s also moved to change the name of the U.S. Defense Department to the Department of War.

In Barack Obama's footsteps?

Only four U.S. presidents and former presidents have received the prize: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

Carter won in 2002, two decades after leaving office. Obama’s 2009 award came just nine months into his presidency.

“He's done a lot more to earn the Nobel Peace Prize than Barack Obama did when he got it. So I imagine that it is probably frustrating for him,” Leslie Shedd, a former senior advisor to the House Foreign Affairs Committee who’s now a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, said of Trump.

Jon Alterman, a former State Department official and current Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said many past winners had engaged in peace negotiations for years before receiving the award.

“It's partly about timing. It's partly about circumstances. It's partly about relationships,” he said. “What it's not about is you just come up with a perfect formula, and we're done.”

No ‘capitulation’ prize

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 election to Trump, said in August she would personally nominate him if the president could end the Ukraine war without ceding territory to Russia.

“But a peace forged on Russian terms is unlikely to win Trump a Nobel Peace Prize: One doesn’t get the prize for capitulation,” Council on Foreign Relations President Michael Froman wrote in a recent column.

After his Alaska summit with Putin in August, Trump was caught on a hot mic telling French President Emmanuel Macron, “I think he wants to make a deal for me.”

Since then, however, Putin has said he'll only meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy if he comes to Moscow. (Zelenskyy responded that if Putin did not want to meet, inviting him to Moscow was a surefire way.)

Touting his “very good relationship” with Putin, Trump reflected on Sept. 3 that he thought it “would be much easier,” to solve the war, which he famously bragged he could end in one day.

Is Trump 'too eager'?

Alterman, the analyst at CSIS, said that “appearing too eager or too urgent” to make a deal can become a “tool that's used against you rather than leverage in your favor” in negotiations.

In the case of Netanyahu, who has rejected calls from Trump and other world leaders to quit his campaign to eradicate Hamas amid the destruction of Gaza and the deaths of more than 60,000 Palestinians, Alterman said Netanyahu views the fight as one for Israel’s survival.

“For a lot of Israelis, they say that October 7th reinforced that there's no cure for Palestinian hostility,” Alterman said.

In March, Trump gave Hamas an ultimatum, saying there would be “hell to pay” and it will ”OVER for you” if hostages were not released.

He took to social media on Sept. 3 to seemingly advise the Israeli government to “tell Hamas to IMMEDIATELY give back” the roughly 20 living hostages “and things will change rapidly. IT WILL END!”

He issued yet another ultimatum on Sept. 7, writing, "The Israelis have accepted my Terms. It is time for Hamas to accept as well. I have warned Hamas about the consequences of not accepting. This is my last warning, there will not be another one!"

'What a bloody mess'

But after Trump noted that it was Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that began the war, he said it was time for Netanyahu to wrap up his operation.

“That was about as bad as it gets, and nobody can forget that,” Trump said of Oct. 7, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed. “With that being said, it's got to get over with.”

Responding to the ongoing war, leaders of Australia, Britain, France, Canada, and Belgium have announced plans, some with conditions, to formally recognize a Palestinian state at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, which Trump is set to address on Sept. 23.

As Putin blew past yet another of Trump's deadlines, the president lamented Sept. 2 that he was “disappointed” and said they’d speak soon.

“Sometimes you never know with war,” Trump said the next day. “War is complex and dangerous and – and what a mess. What a bloody mess.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump talks up Nobel Peace Prize as carnage mounts in Ukraine and Gaza

Reporting by Francesca Chambers, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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