ISLAMABAD: US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he was “honored” that Pakistan’s powerful army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, credited him with “saving millions and millions of lives” by preventing a war between Pakistan and India from escalating during a military standoff in May 2025.
Trump’s remarks referred to the most serious confrontation between the two nuclear-armed neighbors in years, which erupted earlier this year and brought them close to full-scale conflict before US-led diplomacy helped defuse tensions.
The president made the comments following a visit to Washington earlier this month by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Munir — Pakistan’s first civilian-military delegation to the White House in six years — for high-level talks on trade, counterterrorism cooperation and regional security.
“The prime minister of Pakistan [Shehbaz Sharif] was here [US] along with the Field Marshal [General Asim Munir], who’s a very important guy in Pakistan, and he was here three days ago,” Trump said as he addressed a gathering of American military leaders.
He said Munir, speaking to a group that included two generals, credited him with preventing a potentially catastrophic conflict with India from escalating, telling those present that Trump had “saved millions of lives because he saved the war from going on.”
