WASHINGTON | US President Donald Trump on Friday lashed out at Norway for not awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize, claiming he deserved eight prizes for the eight wars he said he had settled.  Addressing a rally in Syracuse, New York, Trump also claimed to have saved 50 million lives by preventing nuclear-armed India and Pakistan from going to war.

 “The United States of America, represented by me as your president, should have received the Nobel Peace Prize, but didn’t. And this is an indelible stain on the country of Norway, and those people that made such a disgraceful and embarrassing decision,” Trump said.

 “The Nobel Peace Prize has been forever discredited by a handful of radical ideologues who are anti-democracy and really enemies of civilisation. We will not forget, Norway, that you didn’t give this prize,” he added. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Navi Pillay, the South African former UN human rights chief, for her work on justice and accountability for war crimes and genocide. Trump dismissed her as someone “nobody ever heard of”.

“The Nobel Prize was given out today (Friday) to a liberal person who works at the United Nations, who nobody has ever heard of. I’ve never heard of the person, but congratulations anyway,” Trump said.  He then listed the conflicts he claimed to have resolved, adding that he was working to end two more — the wars involving Iran and Russia and Ukraine.

 “We will not forget Norway, that you didn’t give this prize with the greatest record in history — eight wars, we should have had 8 Nobel Prizes for each war — but that you didn’t give the Nobel Prize for Peace to the United States of America,” Trump said.

 Trump also claimed to have prevented Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and averting a wider conflict.  “Additionally, I stopped Iran from having a nuclear weapon and blowing up the entire Middle East and ultimately far beyond the Middle East, including Europe, perhaps the US and I saved more lives than anyone in history,” he said.

Four US presidents have received the Nobel Peace Prize: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. Obama won the award in 2009, his first year in office.  Trump has repeatedly criticised Obama’s Nobel win, arguing that his predecessor “got a prize for doing nothing”.